


Under the Brine

by liadan14



Series: lover with a radar phone [12]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: AU for season 3 - no one dies, Established Relationship, Explicit Sexual Content, Future Fic, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Multi, Mutual Pining, Neil Hargrove's A+ Parenting, Non-Chronological, Secret Relationship, all other pairings as in canon, set in chicago
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-07
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:27:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 37,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23531572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liadan14/pseuds/liadan14
Summary: The fourth of July is rough, usually.Billy doesn’t like going out or being near crowds, on the day itself, and neither of them can stand the sound of fireworks. It’s why Steve always takes the day off. He knows his colleagues think he’s some crazy patriot, but it’s worth it.The first few years after, Billy would just spend the whole day in bed. Steve brought him snacks and watched TV while Billy slept through the day. It’s gotten better slowly. Last year, they did a barbecue on the balcony for the first time. Billy manned the grill shirtless, the star-shaped scar in the middle of his chest on proud display.This year, Steve’s actually been looking forward to it. Will and Dustin moving back east - home, he secretly thinks – has put him in a good mood. No matter that they spent all day dragging boxes around for Will and Dustin, no matter that he’s sweating like a pig by midday, no matter that he’s wasting his vacation days for this, Steve’s happy.
Relationships: Billy Hargrove/Steve Harrington, Will Byers/Dustin Henderson
Series: lover with a radar phone [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1571581
Comments: 78
Kudos: 188





	1. Prologue: stage a situation (control my feet)

**July 2nd 1994**

Will and Dustin move to Chicago in July. 

They drive east from LA early on the morning of the second, having packed up their apartment the night before and stowed as much as possible in the moving van. Will, calmer under pressure, drives the van. Dustin drives behind him in the BMW he inherited from Steve years ago that's mostly still running on prayers and Billy changing the oil every time they see him. They keep their walkie-talkies on, on the dashboards, tuned to their private frequency.

“This isn’t the same,” Will complains, listening to Dustin call some asshole in a Mercedes in the left lane a _motherfucking fucktard with fucking maggots for brains_ , tinny and scratchy through the radio.

“Do you really want to hear this in person?” Dustin asks. “There are approximately shit-billion other fucking atrocious drivers on the roads today, you’ll get sick of it.”

Will sighs. “I _like_ driving with you.”

“You’re weird.”

“You like me.”

“Yeah, well, I’m weird, too.”

Will loses track of the conversation trying to merge left in morning traffic in LA, and by the time they hit the outskirts, he’s almost okay with the change to status quo.

“Goddamn,” Dustin says when they’re finally out of the worst of it, headed towards miles and miles of desert before they hit central America. “I am not going to miss making this drive six times a year.”

“I guess the Midwest is good for something,” Will agrees, privately mourning spending thirty hours in the passenger seat, listening to Dustin talk.

“Aw, come on,” Dustin says. “The Midwest is great. Everyone lives there. They have seasons!”

“You’re going to regret that when it starts getting humid,” Will reminds him.

“Ah, fuck,” Dustin says. “Ruin my fun.”

“It’s what I live for.”

They spend the night in the creepiest motel in Nebraska (possibly in the entire United States of America). It’s where they stop over every time they've made the drive since they both moved out to the greater Los Angeles area for college, so it has a kind of cult status at this point. The guy at the desk has greasy, combed over hair, watery blue eyes and an exceedingly nervous smile. In their tiny two-bedroom apartment in LA, Will and Dustin had a list of theories about what his dark secret was tacked to the fridge, with _split personality – thinks he’s his own mom_ naturally topping the list. 

Every single room has a color scheme, transmitted entirely in the gingham décor and the dress of the dead-eyed, dusty doll sitting on top of every single closet. Lucas hadn’t believed them until Dustin bought a polaroid camera in junior year of college for the express purpose of documenting it. 

The shower doesn’t get much more than lukewarm and the hissing noise the pipes make convinces Will there’s some gross shit stuck inside those pipes and he’s not really getting clean, he’s just bathing in the runoff of something weird. The tiny free shampoo bottles all have expiration dates that came and went a decade ago. The sheets smell faintly of someone else’s cigarettes, and tonight, they’re in the orange room, so one of the blankets actually has a hole burned into it. The TV only picks up televangelists.

“So, we are never staying here again,” Will says when he comes out of the shower. He managed to find clean boxers in his suitcase before he went into the bathroom, but he's naked from the waist up because he couldn't find his pajamas. He’s rubbing his hair on the towel provided by the hotel, but he’s not sure if the towel is drying his hair so much as his hair is making the towel wet.

Dustin looks up and then away, swallowing heavily. “Mm,” he agrees. “Hey, wait! You finally found an upside to moving!”

Will throws the uncomfortably clammy towel at Dustin’s face.

Later, after Dustin’s showered, too, and given up on drying his hair with the antiquated, off-white hairdryer in the bathroom, Will looks over at him in the low light of Dustin’s bedside lamp. He’s reading one of the Tamora Pierce novels Erica Sinclair sends him in the mail sometimes with no explanation and never mentions when they meet in person, wearing his black-rimmed reading glasses.

“You know I’m not actually upset about moving, right?” He asks.

Dustin sticks the leather bookmark he’s been using since elementary school into _Lioness Rampant_. “I mean, I hoped so,” he says.

“Chicago was what we both wanted for grad school for the same reasons,” Will says. “It’s been nice, living in California, but I want to be closer to everyone else again.” He knows he hasn’t said it much in the last few months, ever since they sent off their applications to schools in the Midwest and the East Coast, Will for his MSW, Dustin for his Ph.D. Things have just been too busy, finishing up undergrad, apartment hunting via phone calls with Max and Steve, packing everything up.

Dustin smiles at him. Dustin still smiles like his teeth never finished growing in, wide and showing the gap that no longer is at the front. He looks like an enormous goof, and it’s Will’s favorite thing about him. “I’m glad,” Dustin says.

Will reaches across the scant distant between the two twin beds to flick at his nose. “Besides, it would be so weird to not live with you now. Stability is important in transitional periods.”

-

**Claremont, April 20th 1990**

Will calls Dustin up on a campus payphone at three AM on a Tuesday in April. 

Dustin, twenty-six miles away in his dorm room at Cal Tech, answers on the first ring.

“Why aren’t you asleep?” Will asks him.

“Why aren’t you?”

“Can you come to Pomona?”

“I’ll be there in half an hour.”

Will sneaks back into his room, where his roommate, Dave, grumbles in his sleep and rolls over. Will changes into a pair of jeans, but he leaves the _Indy 500_ shirt that Lonnie gave him when he was eight on. It’s still too big, but it’s soft and comfy. He toes into his sneakers, grabs his wallet and his keys and shuts the door as quietly as he can.

He sits on the curb of the walkway in front of his dorm, breathing in the cool night air through the filter of his cigarette. He’s not really much of a smoker, but he has what Dave calls a party pack because it’s a lot easier to talk to people at parties with something in your hand. It’s also easier to make friends when you can give people stuff.

Half an hour is enough time for him to start feeling like an idiot for calling Dustin. 

Half an hour is about three times the time he needs to be furiously relieved he didn’t give into his first impulse of calling his mom.

He can hear her voice in his head even now – _Don’t you think you’d feel better a little closer to home, sweetie?_ when he’d come tearing into the living room, clutching an acceptance letter to Pomona and a sizeable offer for financial aid. The fight had been one of their worst. It had only ended when Will yelled, “I don’t want to be Zombie Boy for the rest of my life, mom!” and stormed out the front door. When he’d come back from playing video games at Mike’s an hour and a half past his curfew, Joyce had been sitting on the couch, alone, Hopper nowhere in sight. “I crunched the numbers,” she had said. “We won’t be able to get you a car, but we can get you on the campus meal plan.” They had hugged it out and never talked about it again, but Will still refuses to show her just how hard it has been, to be so far away from home for the first time.

The last tiny ember of his cigarette is burning out when Dustin comes up to him. He’s wearing a baseball cap and a button-up shirt. It’s still the middle of the night.

“So,” Dustin says. “I have an idea. Stop me if it’s…yeah. Stop me.”

Will makes no effort to stop him.

“Let’s get an apartment off-campus together next year. Or tomorrow.”

Will still doesn’t stop him, so Dustin continues, pacing back and forth. His left shoelace is loose, and likely to come open any second.

“I know that California was supposed to be a fresh start for both of us, and that living in dorms and eating cafeteria food is an important learning experience that everyone shares, but we’ve done both those things now. It’s not necessarily a contradiction in terms to have a fresh start and to still live together, we never lived together in Hawkins. Besides, some studies have shown that it’s important to keep constants for children and young adults during periods of transition because the psychological damage you do can be harrowing otherwise. Beyond the immediate psychological benefits, it's possible I might be hard to live with, but if we get an apartment, we can get separate rooms, and we can set up a system regarding cleaning. So, in summary, I think that living together wouldn’t be a step back for either of us, and I think it could have some material benefits for both of us in terms of mental health.”

“Been practicing that long?” Will asks.

Dustin’s jaw clenches. “Don’t be a dick, Will. I drove here for you.”

Will swallows. 

It’s easy to forget that Dustin is a much sharper judge of character that Will himself or any of their friends. If he had said that to Mike or Max, he would have had a blow-out argument. If he’d said it to Lucas, they would both have laughed the whole thing off and not talked about it again. If he’d asked El, she’d have told him exactly how long she’d been practicing. Dustin, on the other hand, is hard to insult and harder still to distract when he has a plan. Not for the first time in their friendship, Will feels uncomfortably seen. He wraps his arms around himself and looks away.

“I haven’t slept properly in three days,” he says.

Dustin sits down on the curb next to him.

“Last week I had a dream. When I woke up, Dave had his D&D manual out and kept asking why I was dreaming about the Mind Flayer and if we could do a campaign with it.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah,” Will huffs, trying to smile. “The week before Winter break started, I woke up screaming. I’m not sure if he forgot or not.”

Dustin pushes a bit of dirt on the sidewalk around with his shoe. “I get really homesick,” he tells Will. “I feel like I have to call Steve, and my mom, and El, and Mike, and Lucas, and Max every other day or else something will have happened to them and I’ll have missed it. Sometimes I can’t even sleep at all because I get so worried about them.”

“I’d really like to live with you,” Will says.

“Can I give you a hug now?”

Will laughs shakily. “I’d like that,” he says.

Dustin kneels up on the curb next to him and wraps him up in a too-tight hug, smelling like stale coffee and the shampoo he’s been using since Steve told him to start in the eighth grade. Will hugs him back, squeezes a little around Dustin’s middle. 

“I’m glad you’re in California with me,” he says, muffled against Dustin’s shoulder.

In the end, they don’t move in together until the start of sophomore year, but for the six weeks until the semester ends, Will can comfort himself to sleep just remembering how Dustin had hugged him, how he’d dipped his fries in his milkshake at the 24-hour diner they’d driven to that night, how he’d talked about his research paper for his mandatory lit class and how he hadn’t left Will alone no matter how often Will had said he could.


	2. riding high (on the whiplash)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The fourth of July is rough, usually.
> 
> Billy doesn’t like going out or being near crowds, on the day itself, and neither of them can stand the sound of fireworks. It’s why Steve always takes the day off. He knows his colleagues think he’s some crazy patriot, but it’s worth it. 
> 
> The first few years after, Billy would just spend the whole day in bed. Steve brought him snacks and watched TV while Billy slept through the day. It’s gotten better slowly. Last year, they did a barbecue on the balcony for the first time. Billy manned the grill shirtless, the star-shaped scar in the middle of his chest on proud display.
> 
> This year, Steve’s actually been looking forward to it. Will and Dustin moving back east - _home_ , he secretly thinks – has put him in a good mood. No matter that they spent all day dragging boxes around for Will and Dustin, no matter that he’s sweating like a pig by midday, no matter that he’s wasting his vacation days for this, Steve’s happy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: swearing, alcohol consumption, mentions of trauma that occurred in canon

**Chicago, July 4th 1994**

Steve takes a long weekend over Independence Day. He has for as long as he’s had enough overtime to allow for it. Still, he keeps his badge on him until the evening of the fourth, until they’ve finally finished moving all of Will and Dustin’s shit into their new apartment, because technically, the moving van is parked illegally and Steve’s the only one who can talk them out of that.

He’s got the badge clipped to the hip of his jeans – which he knows is a thing for Billy, he knows it and he does it anyway, because it’s a thing for Steve, to be a thing for Billy – and it’s a weird feeling. He’s gotten really used to wearing it in the inside pocket of his suit in the last two years, ever since he made detective and started working in white collar crime. 

Max has not stopped making fun of him for the damn badge for even ten solid minutes since they started the process of unpacking all the boxes from the van.

This is just Steve’s life now.

“Where do you guys want this one?” He asks, hefting a box that is both heavy and suspiciously solid, like there's just another box inside it instead of different things that should move around when you carry it. This is what happens when you let Dustin move by himself: He has some sort of grand master plan of how to pack the most efficiently, and it _works_ and now he won’t shut up about it for the next fifteen years.

Will peers at the side of the box. “Kitchen,” he says. “That’s why we wrote ‘Kitchen’ on it.”

“Yeah, well, you shoulda stacked them with the writing facing out,” Steve grumbles, and drags the box into the kitchen.

Will trails after him and slices the top open with his box cutter as soon as Steve’s put it down.

“Sweet,” he mutters, pulling out a piece of paper and a pen. He scrawls something on it, rummages a bit deeper in the box and pulls out a Tupperware full of magnets. He sticks the paper to the fridge and nods to himself, like writing _5\. Ate his own twin in the womb_ on a piece of scrap paper was a vital part of the whole moving process.

Steve’s pretty much accepted that not really understanding the kids is his lot in life.

He’s not complaining.

The fourth of July is rough, usually.

Billy doesn’t like going out or crowds, on the day itself, and neither of them can stand the sound of fireworks. It’s why Steve always takes the day off. He knows his colleagues think he’s some crazy patriot, but it’s worth it. 

The first few years after, Billy would just spend the whole day in bed. Steve brought him snacks and watched TV while Billy slept through the day. It’s gotten better slowly. Last year, they did a barbecue on the balcony for the first time. Billy manned the grill shirtless, the star-shaped scar in the middle of his chest on proud display.

This year, Steve’s actually been looking forward to it. Will and Dustin moving back east - _home_ , he secretly thinks – has put him in a good mood. No matter that they spent all day dragging boxes around for Will and Dustin, no matter that he’s sweating like a pig by midday, no matter that he’s wasting his vacation days for this, Steve’s happy. 

At around four, when all the boxes are at least inside the apartment and Will and Dustin have dropped the moving van off at the closest U-Haul, they all go back to Steve and Billy’s. It’s close by, just about three blocks, only another two blocks away from Lucas and Max’s apartment. Steve doesn’t like to admit it (because Billy calls him a sap), but he likes having them all so close. He likes when Max stops off at their place after work for dinner when Lucas is working late; he likes when Lucas leaves him a message on his pager to ask whether they’re playing basketball that weekend. He hopes Will and Dustin will like it just as much.

“You’re such a mom,” Billy stage-whispers to him in the kitchen while they’re getting some iced tea and beer ready for everyone now sprawled in front of the air conditioner in their living room after the move.

“Shut up,” Steve says. “You love it.”

“Maybe a little,” Billy tells him, grinning at Steve’s outrage.

“A little,” Steve says. “A _little_.”

“I’m _dying_ of _dehydration_ here,” Robin calls from the living room.

Steve grabs the tray of drinks and brings it to the living room where Robin’s sprawled flat under her back under the ceiling fan while Lucas and Dustin push each other off the best air conditioner seat. He puts it on the coffee table, where Robin immediately grabs a beer off of it.

“Okay,” he says. “First of all, beer is not good for dehydration, second, what exactly did you do today? I don’t seem to remember you doing the heavy lifting.”

“Someone needs to organize these things,” she says loftily, then burps loudly. 

“Oh, yeah,” Billy drawls, coming into the living room with a bowl of chips because he’s secretly a fancy bitch who puts chips in a bowl instead of eating them straight out the bag like Steve would. “Standing in the moving van and telling us which boxes to pick up, definitely couldn’t have done it without you.” His hand rests, too hot, at the small of Steve’s back as he moves Steve further into the room so he can get around him.

“I don’t know, I like watching you pick up heavy stuff,” Steve says, brain on autopilot. 

Billy pats his cheek. “I know you do, baby.”

-

**Chicago, November 24th 1988**

“ _What?_ ” Steve asks, standing in the doorway, holding a casserole dish with red oven mitts.

Then, “Ow, shit,” as he puts the dish down on the table.

Then, “Um, Billy, could you come to the kitchen for a second?”

Since his options are spontaneously combusting from embarrassment or coming to the kitchen for a second, Billy chooses the latter. 

“How could you not tell me?” Steve asks the instant the kitchen door is closed behind them.

“I thought you knew!” Billy hisses.

“How would I have known? You were all…seductive and stuff.”

“Seductive?” Billy says. “Seductive?! I literally let you do whatever the hell you wanted with me. I _still_ do that.”

“I would have made it a lot more special,” Steve says.

“It was special to me,” Billy says. “Was it not special to you?”

“No, Billy, that’s not what I meant,” Steve says, placating. “I just meant…I wish I’d known.”

Billy shifts uncomfortably. “I thought it was obvious,” he says. 

Steve runs a hand through his already disastrous hair. “It wasn’t obvious to me.”

“I’m getting that.”

Billy folds his arms around himself, feeling raw and laid bare. “Sorry I’m not more experienced or whatever.”

Steve makes an exasperated noise. “You can’t honestly think I care.”

“What else am I supposed to think, you’re the one making a fuss.”

“Billy, come on, don’t be like that.”

Billy makes a short, aggravated noise. “Be like what, Steve? Be like me?”

“Be angry at me,” Steve says, soft and vulnerable like it’s so easy.

“I’m not angry,” Billy says, angrily. 

Steve’s shoulders are hunched and he’s looking at the floor. “Yeah you are,” he says. “I don’t get it. I just…I just wanted to say I wish you’d told me because I feel like I sprung a lot on you at once and expected all this stuff from you that I wouldn’t have if I had known you were a virgin when we started hooking up.”

The word makes heat bloom in Billy’s face, aggressively and uncomfortably. “I’m not angry at you,” he gets out through clenched teeth. “I’m really fuckin’ embarrassed and I don’t get why we need to talk about this now.”

Steve looks up. “Because it _matters_ ,” he says. “It matters that I didn’t know and treated you like that for so long.”

“You treated me well.”

“Only because—”

“Only because _what_ , Steve?”

“You only think that because you were used to being treated like shit,” Steve says, hot and low. “If you had any idea what you’re worth you wouldn’t have let me fuck you bare without so much as a date first.”

Billy’s instinctive reaction is to hide, to tell Steve that he’s worth nothing and never was, but he knows by now that Steve wouldn’t like that. He shrugs uncomfortably instead. “It got us here, didn’t it?” He asks helplessly.

“Yeah,” Steve says. “I just…what if you regret it, someday?”

“Huh?”

“You know, what if you want to know what other people are like? People who don’t…do things like I do them in bed?”

Because this night has not been embarrassing enough, Billy blurts out, “Steve, you’ve ruined me for anyone else.”

Steve flushes, but it’s too late now, so Billy barrels on. “You know I, I’m in love with you, right? Like, you know you’re stuck with me? And that I don’t _want_ anyone else? And that I don’t care where we started? We’re here _now_.”

It’s like Steve’s whole face softens, unbearable sap that he is. “I know now,” he says, and wraps Billy up in an enormous bear hug.

“Okay,” Billy says. “Good. That’s, uh, that’s good.”

“I’m sorry you said I was your first in front of all our friends,” Steve says, muffled into Billy’s shoulder.

Billy groans. 

“Do you want to hide in here for the rest of the evening?”

Billy sighs and nods.

“Tough luck,” Steve says, grinning at him as they separate. “It’s Thanksgiving, you gotta be with family.”

-

**Chicago, July 4th 1994**

Billy’s just started throwing burgers on the grill when the doorbell rings. 

Steve frowns, stomach growling. They weren’t really expecting anyone else. He does a quick head count, but no – Max, Lucas, Will, Dustin and Robin are all here, and while they usually have more people over for holidays, it didn’t work out that way this year. Mike and El are in Boston because El has summer classes and Mike is still a baby about being separated from her. Jonathan and Nancy are in New York because they both have to work and also because Steve still hasn’t really forgiven them for eloping and not telling him. Carol and Tommy and their sons drove down to Hawkins for the holiday. There’s not really anyone else it could be, unless Joyce decided to follow her worst mothering impulses and drive up to Chicago to help Will move after all.

He opens the door, expecting a neighbor telling them to keep it down, or maybe Liz from work with some emergency, in which case he’ll have to tell her he’s not sober enough to do his job right now.

He’s a little blindsided when a guy in a full suit and sunglasses flashes him an FBI badge.

“Officer Harrington?” The man asks.

“Yup,” Steve says, like he’s not wearing washed-out cut-off shorts and a tank top, looking the least professional. “That’s me.”

“I’m Agent Hughes, this is my associate, Dr. Yen.” Dr. Yen, a slight Asian man, nods to Steve from behind Agent Hughes. Steve nods back.

“May we come in?” Agent Hughes asks.

“Sure,” Steve says. “I have some friends over, for, uh, for the holiday.”

“Ah,” Hughes says. “I’m here on business, I’m afraid. Sensitive business.”

“Uh-huh,” Steve says. “What kind?”

“It’s to do with the Hawkins National Lab…incident.”

Steve’s heart sinks in his chest, down through the bottom of his stomach and straight into his unsteady knees. “If it helps,” he hears himself say, “everyone who’s here now signed the same non-disclosure agreements I did.”

“Excellent,” Dr. Yen says, as if anything will ever be excellent again.

They follow Steve into the living room, where Robin and Max are arranging the right sequence of tapes to listen to for the next three hours, where Lucas, Dustin and Will are playing Go Fish like it’s an Olympic sport, where he can see Billy through the door to the balcony, tipping his head back to swallow the last of his beer, curls shining in the sunlight, neck a long, graceful line.

“Billy,” he croaks, then clears his throat and says, “Billy,” louder.

Billy, pokes his head in through the door. “What’s up?”

Steve doesn’t even know how to begin. 

He doesn’t have to, it turns out, because Agent Hughes looks over to Billy with a frankly disturbing expression of interest. “You must be William Hargrove,” he says.

“Yeah,” Billy says, wary.

Dr. Yen has pulled out a notebook. “If the rest of you could give us your names as well?” It’s not really a question, and no one protests.

“Can you tell us what this is about now?” Steve asks impatiently after Lucas has spelled his last name three times.

Dr. Yen puts away his pen and paper, and, casual as you please, says, “We’ve recently been alerted that attempts are being made to conclude some experiments that started in 1983. I believe you’re all aware of them.”

“Why are you here?” Will asks, when no one else dares to.

“Process of elimination,” Agent Hughes says. “We’re seeking out everyone who was involved in the original incidents to make sure it’s nothing to do with them.”

“We closed the gate,” Lucas says, getting up. He’s taller than either of the visitors, standing. “Three times.”

“Procedure is procedure,” Agent Hughes says. “Have any of you heard…anything?”

No one responds. 

“What about strange feelings? Dreams?” Dr. Yen prods.

“I never stopped dreaming about it,” Will says, with a calm Steve could never possess.

“You reported an extra-sensory awareness of the being in 1985,” Dr. Yen says. “Have you felt anything similar?”

“No,” Will says. He sounds less sure. Maybe that’s just Steve’s imagination, though, because he’s suddenly not sure of anything anymore.

“Well,” Agent Hughes says. “I’ll leave my card. If you think of anything, don’t hesitate to call.”

“That’s it?” Billy asks. “Are you not going to tell us any more about what’s going on?”

“I’m afraid that’s classified,” he says. “I’d like to remind you all of the contracts you signed ensuring your silence on this matter. Your adherence to them is of vital importance in this case.” He hands Steve a business card and then, with no goodbye, he leaves.

“Son of a bitch,” Dustin says into the silence he leaves behind. It’s the first time, from him, that it sounds like an insult.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy thursday, everyone. The plot has arrived. I'm expanding my schedule to be Tues/Thurs/Sat because I'm almost done writing.
> 
> This chapter's flashback is basically a missing scene to [this fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22324240), and I'll be adding links to [a timeline](https://bewires.tumblr.com/post/190383828850/timeline-for-some-dumb-fanfiction) under each chapter in case you want, but to reiterate, neither is necessary to follow this fic.
> 
> This chapter's title is from "Fever Pitch" by Rainbow Kitten Surprise. Fave lyric: _lost my soul in the seventh heaven making out on aisle eleven_.
> 
> What do you think, is Will right about the creepy receptionist from chapter 1?


	3. lost my heart when my back was turned (if you see it, will you let me know?)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Of all the things Will’s talked to Billy about – what it’s like to be gay in Hawkins, having a dad who not only doesn’t understand but actively hates you for it, how to get tested for STDs (not that Billy was all that helpful on that front) and what it feels like to be in love – Will’s never actually talked to him about the one other thing they have in common. 
> 
> Dustin’s the one who can make stories about that time interesting and funny, the one who can sit down and start a conversation with, “so that time I accidentally let an interdimensional hell demon eat my cat” and make people laugh. Will’s watched him do it, actually, with the improv theater group he took part in for his performing arts credits in undergrad. With Dustin, Will has joked about the Mind Flayer having a type: tragic closet cases named William. With Dustin, Will has pretended to have a waking nightmare about being possessed in order to steal the last of the fudge brownie ice cream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for swearing, canonical trauma, underage drinking, mild drug use (marijuana), referenced sexual situations between teenagers who are both above 18, though their ages are not explicitly stated, discussions of sexual identity in the 1980s and all the baggage and outdated ideology and terminology that comes with.

**Chicago, July 4th 1994**

The charcoal on the barbecue is cold when Steve goes out to check. The burger patties are shriveled up and blackened.

Will’s never been less hungry in his life.

 _Lie,_ he thinks, as if it matters when he lies to himself, remembering Christmas in 1983, spitting up leeches in a bathroom that was and wasn’t his.

“We should probably call everyone up,” Steve says when he gets back in, food and charcoal tied up in a hefty bag. 

“Seems like they’ll get visited by the FBI either way,” Billy says. It’s hard to tell if he’s being sarcastic or just factual. Maybe both.

“They can’t all come here,” Max points out. “That’s super fucking suspicious, if we all meet up.”

“How can it be suspicious if we’re literally not the ones opening the gate?” Dustin asks, but it’s half-hearted at best. 

“Max is right,” Billy says. “If we tell everyone, that will ring all sorts of alarm bells.”

Steve’s frowning. “If someone does open it, we need them here. Doesn’t matter what the FBI thinks of it.”

Robin nods. “I’m with dingus. The FBI did shit-all to close it last time, that was all Billy.”

Billy stands abruptly and leaves the room.

Will wishes he could do the same.

“Hey, Will?” Lucas asks. 

“Yeah?”

“Did you really not feel…anything?”

“No,” Will says tightly.

“What the fuck, Lucas,” Dustin says. “Do you think he’d lie?”

“I had to ask,” Lucas starts, and he and Dustin start squabbling back and forth about whether or not it’s okay to abandon all human decency and restraint in this kind of situation.

Will goes to the kitchen.

Billy’s drinking water. His back is to the sink, as if he’s waiting for someone to barge in on him. He’s probably expecting Steve, but Steve’s playing mediator between Dustin and Lucas.

“Hey,” Will says.

Of all the things he’s talked to Billy about – what it’s like to be gay in Hawkins, having a dad who not only doesn’t understand but actively hates you for it, how to get tested for STDs (not that Billy was all that helpful on that front) and what it feels like to be in love – Will’s never actually talked to him about the one other thing they have in common. 

Dustin’s the one who can make stories about that time interesting and funny, the one who can sit down and start a conversation with, “so that time I accidentally let an interdimensional hell demon eat my cat” and make people laugh. Will’s watched him do it, actually, with the improv theater group he took part in for his performing arts credits in undergrad. With Dustin, Will has joked about the Mind Flayer having a type: tragic closet cases named William. With Dustin, Will has pretended to have a waking nightmare about being possessed in order to steal the last of the fudge brownie ice cream.

With Billy, it’s harder, because Will doesn’t know how much he’s healed from it. Will doesn’t really know how much he’s healed from it, himself, he just knows that it helps him to turn the worst of it into something he can laugh about, especially when Dustin realizes he’s been conned out of his ice cream. 

“What does it feel like?” Billy asks him bluntly.

“Huh?”

“When you felt it come back. When it had me.”

Will closes the kitchen door. “I felt all the hair on the back of my neck stand up,” he says. “You know when a bug bites you and you don’t notice till it’s too late and it feels like you're paralyzed for a second? It was like that. Except I felt it in my bones.”

“Will I feel it?”

“I don’t know,” Will admits. 

“Will it take me again?” Billy asks him. This, Will can tell, is all he really cares about. 

“It didn’t take me the second time, it took you,” Will says. “And you kicked it out yourself. Nancy had to burn me with a radiator to get it out.”

Billy makes a face. “Seriously?”

“I still have the scar.”

Billy doesn’t say anything else, just stares out the window at the incongruously beautiful sunset. Will’s trying to think of something encouraging to say when Dustin bursts into the kitchen.

“Do you want to go home?” He asks, a surefire sign he and Lucas couldn’t quite settle their differences.

Will considers staying here, the easy holiday atmosphere clouded with their collective anxiety. He considers going home and not having to deal with it for the next few hours. 

“Sure,” he says. “I’ll get my shoes.”

-

**Hawkins, April 27th 1989**

Dustin’s first inkling that he’s fucked is in senior year of high school. He looks over one day during AP World History and catches a glimpse of Will grinning at the note Dustin just passed him. Their eyes meet, Will’s grin intensifies, and something like a sudden-onset glacier melt occurs in the pit of Dustin’s stomach.

Panic spikes short and sharp in his chest, chased away by the honey-sweet memory of the last time he felt like this, when the prettiest girl at camp wanted to know more about the experiment he was working on.

In less than a minute, the notion has solidified throughout his entire body: Dustin Henderson wants to know what it’s like to kiss Will Byers.

He blinks through the confusion, plasters on a smile, and pretends very effectively to not be bothered at all for the rest of the day.

Well, sort of effectively. Lucas spends a good portion of lunch snapping his fingers in front of Dustin’s face, saying, “Hey, man, you in there?”

Maybe not that effectively. Mike grabs him by the elbow on their way to Calculus II, asks, “Are you okay? You seem weird.”

Actually, it’s entirely likely he’s failed completely at pretending. Max cocks her head at him in AP Bio, ten minutes before the sweet release of the final bell, and says, “Are you getting sick?”

Will doesn’t notice. That’s what’s important. 

He sits in the passenger seat of Dustin’s car, waxing poetic about all the cool stuff they absolutely have to do in LA when they get there that Billy told him about over the phone last night, and Dustin smiles and nods along. 

He manages to drop Will off and drive himself home with some semblance of not causing accidents, and then drops face-first into his bed and screams into the pillow. 

Dustin’s usually pretty in touch with his emotions. He’s definitely in touch with everyone else’s emotions – he knew before anyone that Billy and Steve were a thing; he totally clocked that Robin was in love with her college roommate and made things really awkward when he asked her about it. He definitely knew, when Max liked Lucas better than him, that it was better to pull back and be the bigger man. He knew, when Suzie started talking about Brigham Young University and ways to get around the strictest of her religion’s rules without actually breaking them, that he had to break it off with her. He knew, before Will came out to them, that Will wasn’t interested in girls. He knew that Will liked Mike maybe a little more than he should have. He knew that Will set that aside when Mike passionately declared his love for El in front of them all, tensions high and monsters after them. He knew, because he saw the breath Will took, just after Mike said it, deep and uneven, and how he let it out, slow and steady, his forehead smoothing where Dustin hadn’t even seen it crease up. 

So, it’s really a mystery how this could sneak up so intensely on him. He’s supposed to be good at this shit.

Lying on his back, staring at his ceiling, he reconsiders his life.

It sounds dramatic, but it’s really not. 

Dustin’s always figured himself to be heterosexual for lack of a better word. He knows he’s not gay, because he likes some girls a lot. He loved Suzie. He liked Paula enough to kiss her at the school’s-out bonfire last year, even if that trickled out into nothing over the long months of summer vacation. He vaguely remembers that he liked Max, once, but it’s been so long and there are so many traumatic memories between then and now that it feels kind of like that was a different person. In a secret corner of his mind, he’d wondered if that was enough, just to like a few people who happened to be girls, to make him straight. He’s never wondered enough to ask anyone. It had felt like stepping on their stories, on everything Will and Steve and Robin and especially Billy went through to be where they are now.

He asked by himself, of course. He looked it up at the library. It wasn’t that helpful. 

Pressing a pillow over his face, Dustin decides to stop pretending. He unpacks, slowly, his thoughts about Will.

He thinks about the deep thrill he felt when Will told him they’d be going to college together, how they haven’t been able to talk about anything else for weeks. He thinks about how excited he gets when Will comes to whatever stupid high school party they get invited to that weekend, how he kind of drops the whole baseball team to get drunk with Will all night and talk about whatever movie they saw last. He thinks about how, when he’d been drafted into helping Max teach El how to bake cookies for Hopper’s birthday, they’d gotten into a deep discussion about which of the three absent Party members was the most attractive, and Dustin had been the one to stick up for Will. He thinks about how in awe he’s always been of how kind Will is, when going through even a hint of what Will went through has made Dustin unwilling to trust strangers and more likely to lie to his mom. He tears up a bit, just a tiny bit, remembering how Will had been the one to wait the longest up on Weathertop while Dustin was waiting for Suzie to answer him, the only one to not ditch him, to not say to Dustin's face that he thought Dustin was lying about her.

He thinks again about how Will had smiled at him in class today, wide and earnest and just a little mischievous.

“Fuck,” he groans into his pillow.

“Okay,” he tells himself. “Okay, Dusty, you can do this.”

He’s not entirely sure what he means by ‘this’. He definitely doesn’t mean telling Will he has any sort of butterflies for him. He’s seen how Will looks after he gets out of a free period under the bleachers with Jimmy Hayes, and Dustin is no Jimmy. He means…living, as a person, who has some maybe not heterosexual thoughts.

That weekend, he hooks up with James Dante.

When he tells Steve about it, over the phone, three days after, Steve makes some concerned noises about how James and Troy used to bully him about his condition. Dustin’s low self-esteem is not really what the phone call is about, but he appreciates Steve’s worries.

James took over where Steve left off, as the guy who works at Family Video without knowing anything about cinema, and Dustin still goes there once a week out of habit more than anything else. He and James have gotten, if not friendly, at least tolerant of each other. Ever since El happened, James and Troy have left him alone anyway. 

If he’s being honest, Dustin will admit that he can respect James for staying friends with Troy even after El made him wet himself in front of the whole school. That takes some loyalty. 

It’s a fluke they end up at the same party – James graduated a year ago and doesn’t come to many high school parties. This one is at his co-worker’s little brother’s invitation, though, so a few of the washed-up recent graduates of Hawkins High are in attendance, too. 

Lucas and Max are there, but they’re making out on what passes for a dancefloor and Dustin really doesn’t think now is the time to bother either of them with his sexuality crisis (his Will crisis, his brain reminds him helpfully). He wanders into the kitchen for a refill of his shitty beer instead.

That’s where he finds James, smoking up with two juniors Dustin doesn’t know.

There’s the inevitable moment of awkward eye contact, and then James says, “Hey Henderson. Want a hit?”

“Sure,” Dustin says and ambles over.

Between the end of the joint and the refill of Dustin’s beer, they wind up outside without the juniors, shooting the shit and pretending neither of them harbor resentment for everything that happened in middle school. 

Maybe they don’t. Dustin barely resented it when it happened. He’s never been sure if he wants people to ignore all the things that make him different so he can belong or if he wants to wear on his sleeve how different he is so no one will mistake him for being what he’s not. He can’t really blame other people for not knowing what to do with that either.

“You alright, Henderson?” James asks.

Jesus fuck, he must be really off if James is noticing.

“Just fine,” he says. “Just, uh, thinking.”

James nods and returns to his beer. “Don’t see you without the rest of them often.”

Dustin shrugs, remembers his weird shoulders, and catches himself consciously trying to stop mid-movement. “Lucas and Max are here somewhere. The others had better things to do.”

“Zombie boy, better things to do?”

“You sound jealous.”

“Maybe I am.” James looks out over the back porch of whoever the fuck’s house it is. 

Normally, Dustin would have been done with this conversation the instant James referred to Will by that heinous nickname, but he’s in a weird headspace, so he comes up to the porch railing and leans against it, next to James. “What’ve you got to be jealous of?” He asks.

“I never apologized for all the shit I said to you guys in middle school,” he says.

“That’s for fucking sure,” Dustin agrees.

“I guess it was easier than being myself,” James tells him, looking over to Dustin briefly and then immediately away.

Dustin keeps looking straight at him when he says, “It’s never too late to start being yourself.”

So anyway, that’s the weekend he hooks up with James Dante in the back seat of his car. It’s mostly a lot of sloppy kissing and grinding up against each other with their pants pulled down just enough to get some friction.

It’s not exactly in the top ten memories Dustin’s proud of.

James still hasn’t actually apologized.

He’s definitely not just into girls, he figures, afterwards, and feels kind of guilty for using James as some sort of experiment. He says as much to Steve, on the phone, and Steve isn’t exactly comforting.

“I mean, yeah, don’t use people as experiments,” he says. “That sucks. It doesn’t sound like it meant much to him, either, though.”

Steve is one of Dustin’s all-time favorite people, but he’s really not great at advice a lot of the time. A traitorous voice in Dustin’s head reminds him this is mostly because Dustin skirted around the actual problem – namely, that his heart beats faster every time Will looks at him – and pretended this was just a sexuality thing. Still, it’s good to hear from Steve just to remind himself that there are well-adjusted bisexual adults living out there in the world, even if Dustin has to swear him to secrecy twelve times about the whole thing because he’s just not ready to have this be a Party conversation. 

Steve also doesn’t really help figure out what to do about James now, post-hook-up. Dustin guesses he’ll have no way to know until he asks, so he goes to Family Video the Thursday afterwards (he already owes two dollars in late fees because he was putting it off).

James smiles at him when he walks in, and again when he rings Dustin up. He makes sure to mention that his break is coming up. Dustin loiters around the back, palms sweaty, and when James is barely out the door for his state-mandated half-hour break, he says, “Look, I think I have feelings for someone else, I don’t wanna—”

“Chill,” James says. “You’re leaving for college anyway, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Then let’s just have fun until you do.”

They hook up semi-regularly until school ends and Dustin never stops feeling guilty about it.

Guilty, because now he knows, he can’t help noticing every time Will does something funny, or nice, or clever (which is always, all of the things Will does are one or more of those). Guilty, because once, when he’s kissing James, his brain fast-tracks into categorizing all of the things that would be different if it was Will and it turns him on a lot more and a lot faster than James ever could. Guilty, because his mom catches him coming back from a make-out session that left him feeling emptier and shittier than usual with red-rimmed eyes and Dustin can’t tell her what’s going on. If he got even part of the way into telling her, she would frown and ask him if he’s really sure he wants to go to the West Coast with Will, and Dustin can’t take that.

He wants to go to Cal Tech more than anything, and he wants Will there with him even more than he wants that. 

It might not be the soundest form of self-preservation, but Dustin can’t take the thought of things going any other way.

He breaks it off with James before graduation. It’s even more awkward than beginning things was, if that’s possible. It’s not like anyone ever explained the etiquette of breaking off a casual hook-up.

By pure luck, it’s Max he sees first afterwards, when he’s flustered and out of sorts. She’s skating down the street away from Lucas’s house towards her own, but she stops when she sees him trudging slowly away from the video store.

“Why aren’t you driving?” She asks.

Dustin doesn’t really know how to explain that he’s instituted a new policy of not driving when he knows he’s going to be dumb and emotional, because Hopper’s already made him pay three tickets for rolling through stop signs.

“Did something happen?” She asks when he doesn’t answer.

“Ugh,” Dustin says.

“O-kay,” She says, drawing out the ‘o’. “Is this, like, an ice cream conversation?”

Dustin nods miserably.

He tells her over the tub of Rocky Road she dug out of the freezer at her house that he thinks he might be bisexual. 

She pauses, spoon halfway to her mouth. “No way,” she gasps.

Dustin blushes a dull red and looks away, but she grabs him by the wrist and says, “Dustin, _me too_.”

“Seriously?” He asks. 

“Yes!” She says. “I mean, I love Lucas. But I think, if I weren’t with him, I might like girls, too? And I never knew if that, like, counted?”

“Yes!” Dustin exclaims, pointing at her with his ice cream spoon. “Yes, that’s it! I was never sure, before, you know, if it counted.”

“You’re sure now?”

Dustin takes a big spoon of ice cream.

“Come on, don’t hold out on me, Henderson,” Max cajoles.

“You have to promise to never tell anyone,” he says. “Ever.”

“I promise.”

“Spit swear.”

“Gross,” she says. “What are we, twelve?”

She does it anyway.

“I had a thing with James Dante.”

“Oh my god.” Max’s spoon clatters onto the table. “You have to tell me _everything_.”

Dustin presses his hands against his face, both to show how embarrassed he is about all of this and also to cool his burning face off a little. “There’s not that much to tell. It wasn’t, like, emotion-based.”

“Oh,” Max says. “ _Oh._ What’s that like?”

“I don’t like it,” Dustin says helplessly. “I just…I like guys, but I didn’t have feelings for him and it was weird and terrible.”

Max wrinkles her nose. “That doesn’t sound great.”

Dustin shrugs. “I guess it was a learning experience.”

“How did that even happen?”

“We were at a party together, and I got a sense,” Dustin says vaguely.

“A sense,” Max repeats, skeptical. “What are you, bisexual Spiderman?”

Dustin frowns. “I actually think there’s a solid reading for Spiderman being—”

“Oh my god, stop.”

“Fine.”

“So?” Max asks, expectant, chin propped up on her hand.

“So what?” Dustin asks, mouth full with more ice cream.

“So, are you seeing him again?”

Dustin shudders. “No. I am never going back to Family Video ever again. I just told him I don’t want to keep hooking up with him. It was the worst.”

Max makes an agreeing noise. “Is there anyone you do want to hook up with?”

“No,” Dustin lies.

“Okay, okay,” Max says. “Harrison Ford or Mark Hamill?”

“Mark Hamill,” Dustin says instantly.

“What the fuck, that’s so _wrong_ \--“

“Don’t shame my sexuality! Okay, um, Carrie Fisher or Olivia Newton-John?”

“Olivia Newton-John.”

“You heathen.”

-

**Chicago, July 4th 1994**

When they get home to their apartment full of unpacked boxes, Dustin asks, “Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not now,” Will says.

“Okay.”

Dustin walks to the kitchen to get himself a snack. “Ate his own twin in the womb,” he snickers. “Nice one.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember James Dante? I sure didn't, I had to go look up his name.
> 
> Chapter title is from "Slow" by the Fratellis, and every lyric in that song is good, but the title in its full context is my fave: _lost my heart when my back was turned/if you see it, would you let me know/and if you've got to leave me, baby/won't you do it slow?_
> 
> The joke about the Mind Flayer having a type was something I had actually thought about before I saw this, I swear, but [ihni](https://ihni.tumblr.com/) on tumblr drew it better than I ever could write it with [this comic](https://ihni.tumblr.com/post/187553558527/have-you-noticed-how-both-of-the-mindflayers-main) so you should go look at that.
> 
> Pls feed me with comments I loved writing this chapter and I would love to know what you think!


	4. you through my eyes (this could be so easy)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Do we just wait for some nutjob to open up an alternate dimension again?” Billy says. “Do we do something to stop him? Can we stop him?”
> 
> “I…” Steve halts. “I was never really the ideas guy, Bill. I just…”
> 
> “You just rammed the Mind Flayer with your car.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: Swearing, referenced sex between minors, referenced child abuse, trauma

**Chicago, July 5th 1994**

Steve sleeps for ten hours.

He’d thought, the night before, for long, agonizing minutes, lying in bed next to Billy, who was neither speaking nor sleeping, that he wouldn’t sleep at all. The day caught up with him, though, all the heavy lifting, the boxes, the sunlight, the beer and a half he’d managed before everything went to shit.

He wakes up with sunlight slanting through the window and for a moment, he feels good. Then he remembers and feels empty.

Billy’s side of the bed is cold.

Steve finds him on the balcony. He’s got the manuscript he’s been editing for the last two weeks on his lap, red pen in hand, but he’s staring out at the skyline instead of at the page.

“Are you okay?” Steve asks.

“No.”

“Yeah,” Steve says, rubbing the back of his head. “Dumb question.”

“What do we do now?”

“What do you mean?” Steve sits down on the other deck chair, looks out into the same direction like maybe he’ll understand what Billy’s going through a little better if he has the same sightline.

“Do we just wait for some nutjob to open up an alternate dimension again?” Billy says. “Do we do something to stop him? Can we stop him?”

“I…” Steve halts. “I was never really the ideas guy, Bill. I just…”

“You just rammed the Mind Flayer with your car.”

“Thought you didn’t want to call it that.”

Billy looks over at Steve. His eyes are too bright and red-rimmed. “Well what the fuck else am I gonna call it when I see it, huh?”

“We could still call the others,” Steve says, trying to stay calm. Billy doesn’t need him to melt down right now.

“Yeah, ‘cause that will help, calling in the one girl who can definitely, actually open the gate.”

Steve swallows heavily. “I actually meant Jonathan and Nancy.”

“What’re they gonna do?”

Steve rubs a hand over his face. “Look, there’s something I need to tell you.”

-

**Hawkins, October 12th 1985**

If you’d told Billy last year that he would spend two months living in Steve Harrington’s house, he’d have told you to stop smoking so much crack. He’d have been pretending he had any idea what drug, exactly, crack was and what it did to you.

Billy’s wondered a lot if it’s a human thing, to hate every version of yourself only months after outgrowing it, or if that’s his own special thing.

There’s no version of himself he hates quite as intensely as the version that punched Steve’s lights out less than a year ago.

It’s like Steve doesn’t even remember that it happened.

He was waiting in front of the hospital when Billy was released in early August, rolling himself awkwardly through the halls in the wheelchair they lent him. He hadn’t even known where he’d go – to his dad’s house, when his dad hadn’t so much as visited in the month he’d been in the hospital? To a motel to waste the entirety of the massive check the government gave him for his silence and his sacrifice on living out his last year of high school in a place with maid service?

“I figured we’d drive by the store on the way back,” Steve had said, leaning against his ugly car. “You can pick out what cereal you want and stuff.”

“Where are we going?” Billy had asked stupidly.

“You’re staying with me,” Steve had said, like it was obvious. “There’s no way you can handle the stairs at your—at your dad’s house.”

Billy had gone home with Steve and they haven’t really talked about it since.

Billy has a memory, somewhere in between the blind, screaming panic of the days he spent under the control of something else and the blind, screaming pain of his first weeks of wakefulness, afterwards, of Steve, unkempt beside his hospital bed, saying _I love you_. Billy’s also pretty sure he’s had that fantasy a million times and he doesn’t dare trust it.

He knows the memories from last spring are real, climbing in through Steve’s window every other night to have his mind blown and his heart broken. He knows that, for some unfathomable reason, despite the time Billy broke a plate over Steve’s head, Steve trusted him enough to kiss him, to touch him, to invite him into his house, to press ice to the worst of the bruises Billy brought with him. He knows at least a part of the reason neither of them has mentioned Billy moving back with his family is that he wouldn’t survive it, not weakened and torn up as he is now.

Steve hasn’t so much as kissed him since Billy’s been living in his guest room. 

To be fair, the first few weeks of it, Billy was asleep a lot of the time and strung out on painkillers for the rest of it.

He’s mobile, now, sort of. He’s on crutches, getting himself from one room to the next, driving himself to school and back in Steve’s car (because Steve said he didn’t need it, like it didn’t bother him at all to take the bike he hadn’t ridden since ninth grade to the video store). Billy’s not in a position to turn down his kindness, but it stings.

Maybe, in a few more weeks, he can get a job. Get his own place. Get out of Steve’s hair.

Billy’s half-convinced himself Ralph and Tucker down at the auto shop might let him work there part-time, running numbers in his head, when he drops the mug. It’s one of those tacky mugs where a picture shows up when you put something hot inside. Billy had only filled it with water because he has a hard time carrying containers without handles on his crutches, and it had been nice not to see the sexy Honolulu girl in the grass skirt Steve always laughs at show up on the mug.

It’s Steve’s favorite mug.

Sometimes, the universe sends you a sign that you’ve fallen pretty far. Billy’s is when he hides the broken mug under the guest bed he’s been sleeping in since he got here because he can’t take the stairs to Steve’s room, or maybe because Steve doesn’t want him sleeping there anymore.

It’s not the only thing on his mind that week. He’s still worried about catching up the month of school he missed because he wasn’t able to sit upright for eight hours a day in September; he did the take-home sheets his teachers gave him, but it’s not the same. He’s worried about Max all the time, alone in the house on Cherry Lane. He’s worried that Steve might be dating Robin, because he actually likes Robin and it would be a shame to have to murder her in her sleep.

Really, the broken shards of coffee mug only cross his mind once or twice a day, when Steve roots through the cupboard for it in the morning, hazy-eyed and looking for his caffeine fix before the early shift at the video store (it’s the most pointless shift, Billy knows, because Steve and Robin won’t shut up about how pointless it is for Family Video to open at eight AM when the only people who would go to a video store at that hour on a weekday aren’t looking for family films).

Billy’s struggling over a particularly offensive essay question about narrative perspective in _The Great Gatsby_ at the kitchen table because the desk lamp in the guest room makes his eyes hurt when Steve finally asks him if he’s seen the mug with the Honolulu girl.

 _In conclusion,_ he scrawls out, and then says, almost casually, “Uh, yeah, it broke the other day. I was carrying it with my crutches and I fucked up. Sorry.”

“Aw, that’s a shame,” Steve says and gets another mug out of the cupboard.

_the real tragedy of Gatsby is that Nick Carraway_

Billy stops mid-sentence. “That’s it?” He asks.

“Huh?” Steve asks, turning away from the microwave, where he’s watching his milk spin around in circles, waiting to turn it into cocoa.

“I thought you’d care more,” Billy says. “It was your favorite mug.”

“Honolulu girl did make me happy,” Steve says. “But it was just a mug.”

Just a mug. _In conclusion, the real tragedy of Gatsby is that Nick Carraway spent his summer following Gatsby around instead of dealing with his own issues, because he clearly had a lot and no one else really cared about him_ , Billy writes viciously. 

“Just a mug?” He asks. His throat went raw at some point in the last minute and a half.

Steve pours cocoa powder straight into his mug instead of using a spoon to measure it. “Yeah,” he says. “I bet there’s like twelve mugs just like it at Melvald’s, I’ll ask Joyce.”

It’s not wrong. It’s—it’s the same thing Billy thought every time Neil twisted his arm behind his back over broken plates and cups. It’s what he said, once, stupidly. Neil had pulled out a chunk of his hair in retaliation, which was the only reason Billy grew it into a mullet in the first place – to hide the patch he’d pulled out.

He’s crying, he realizes, his cheeks are wet and hot and he doesn’t get why, because it’s _just a mug_.

“Hey,” Steve says. “Hey, Billy, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Billy says. “Nothing, I’m fine.” He dashes at the wetness around his eyes and only succeeds in getting moisture on his essay, smudging the word _cared_ irreparably. 

Steve’s hand settles on Billy’s shoulder and Billy feels like a solar system collapsing in on itself.

They’ve touched, since he started living here. Steve helped him to bed, to the bathroom, into the shower, for weeks. But those were touches because Steve had to, because Billy needed the help. The hand on his shoulder is heavy and gentle and it’s there for no other reason than to comfort Billy and that just makes it worse.

“I thought you’d be angry,” he hears himself say. “I hid the mug. Because it was your favorite.”

“Aw, Bill,” Steve says. His voice is so gentle, so fond and so sad. “I wouldn’t get angry about stupid shit like that.”

“It’s just a mug,” Billy says.

“Yeah,” Steve says. “It’s just a mug. C’mere.”

He helps Billy up, slowly, because he’s been there every step of the way and he knows how hard it’s been on Billy, knows what he can take. He wraps himself around Billy gently, arms around Billy’s waist, chin hooked over his shoulder, careful not to press and prod against Billy’s chest.

“You don’t have to worry about that with me, okay?” He murmurs against Billy’s ear. “You don’t have to worry about that ever again.”

“Okay,” Billy says mindlessly.

Steve whispers a kiss to his cheek and Billy grabs for him, presses a real kiss to Steve’s mouth, sloppy and wet from his tears.

Steve hums, happy, _delighted_ , and kisses him back.

“Is this…real?” Billy asks when they pull apart. “Are you—are we?”

“I told you, I love you,” Steve says. “I’m kind of hard to get rid of.”

-

**Chicago, July 5th 1994**

“You started looking into Hawkins National Lab,” Billy repeats dully. “At work. Two months ago.”

“Yeah.”

“And you didn’t tell me.”

Steve sighs and wishes he had a cup of coffee or a cigarette or something to do with his hands besides pick at the skin around his nails. “I don’t tell you a lot about my job.”

“Yeah, because I don’t care about most of the rich assholes you take down.”

“A lot of it is also stuff I’m not supposed to tell you.”

Billy looks over at him then, piercing and cold. “Was this something you couldn’t tell me?”

“I wasn’t sure,” Steve says.

“What the fuck does that even mean?”

“I wasn’t sure, alright? We don’t talk that much about the Upside Down or the Mind Flayer and I thought that was what you wanted, so I thought I would just…”

“You would just what, go after the people who did this to me,” Billy gestures towards his chest, “and _never tell me about it_?”

“I was going to tell you when I had something to tell.”

“Do you?”

“Nothing solid. A few leads. The kind of thing Nancy’s good at following up.”

Billy sighs deeply. “Fine,” he says.

“I’m sorry,” Steve says. “I didn’t mean to hurt you, but I did.”

“It’s just a mug.”

“What?”

“I’m gonna try not to be angry.” Billy gets up, taking his manuscript and his pen. “I’m going to go to the office for a couple hours. I’ll be back by five.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this one hurt a little. Join me on Thursday, when Will will be avoiding all his problems!
> 
> Chapter title is from "See You Through My Eyes" by The Head and the Heart - full lyrics is _this could be so easy if you could see you through my eyes_


	5. comfortably mixed (lover, come hold me)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> By the evening, Will’s decided to get wasted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: Alcohol use, some of it underage.

**Chicago, July 5th 1994**

By the evening, Will’s decided to get wasted. He and Dustin got a little day-drunk already, unpacking the living room and kitchen and setting up the couch. The phone’s been dead silent even though it was the first thing they hooked up yesterday. Maybe everyone else has as little desire as he does to think about Agent Hughes. 

He’s still filled with unspent, anxious energy when they’ve gotten the living room clear of the boxes meant for the office, three beers down and the sun starting its slow move towards the horizon. 

“Are we going to talk about it today?” Dustin asks him, sprawled out on their new couch, feet up on an empty, upturned box.

“Not now,” Will tells him. 

“Mkay. What do you want to do tonight?”

Thinking it’ll be a hard sell, Will gives his best wide-eyed expression a go. “Let’s go out,” he says.

Dustin exhales loudly, almost a sigh. “Alright,” he says.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, definitely. I’m gonna need to shower first.”

“Very true.”

“Fuck you.”

Will calls up Max while Dustin’s in the shower, and by the time he’s done with his own shower, tucking his t-shirt into his favorite jeans with his wet hair still dripping onto his shoulders, they’re all at the door. The perks of having your friends apartment-hunt for you from across the country is that they find you an apartment in the neighborhood.

The downside, Will begins to realize, is that they’re always going to be around.

But he was the one who called, tonight, and he’s the one who wants to get trashed. He says as much, pulling his shoes on without so much as letting them in. Dustin’s already talking to Lucas like they didn’t end yesterday on an unpleasant note, discussing which bar they should head to as if he has any idea what he’s talking about.

It’s Billy who picks the bar in the end, shorter on words than usual. There’s a strain around his eyes that Will’s not sure if he’s imagining or projecting. Maybe it’s just that Billy’s not wearing glasses. 

Will sticks to his resolve to get drunk and not think about everything else. 

-

**Los Angeles, February 3rd 1991**

Going clubbing with Will is a special kind of torture. Dustin knows this, but he doesn’t know why he still does it to himself, beyond some really unreasonable animal impulses that he feels like he should be too evolved to give in to. 

There’s a big part of him that clings to how he felt, senior year of high school. Being a bit disconnected from Lucas and Max and Mike and El had been nothing new, them being coupled up, but senior year was the year that Will started going out on weekends without Dustin, to places he couldn’t access with people he didn’t know. It had felt like a loss, and Dustin hadn’t understood it at first. Dustin had been going to house parties for more than a year at that point, because he’d followed Steve’s advice and joined the baseball team. He didn’t always remember to ask Will, and Will didn’t always come when he asked, so it had seemed wrong to Dustin to feel so left out, so hurt, when Will suddenly left for college parties in Bloomington with the Hayes siblings every other weekend. It had only really stopped when Will called him, a day after he got his acceptance to Pomona, and told Dustin on no uncertain terms that they would be seeing each other every week because he would be the only person Will knew out in California.

Retrospectively, Dustin was really dumb about his feelings about Will.

He looks forward to the time, a few years from now, when he’ll be able to look back and think he was dumb now, too. 

Still, the feeling of missing a chance, of telling Will ‘no’, of disappointing him, isn’t something Dustin’s really interested in. When Will asks him if he wants to go out with Will’s Pomona friends, Dustin says yes. Will asked, after all, and he likes to feel like Will wants him around.

Will lives with him, now. They share a bathroom and they make dinner together and they watch TV on evenings when neither of them is cramming for a test or speedwriting an essay. Dustin can see him whenever he wants.

But Will asked.

So, Dustin says he’ll go. Dustin lets Will pick him out what to wear and tries not to read too much into it when Will tells him – casually – which of his jeans make him look the best and which t-shirt brings out his eyes. 

They go to a club with dim lighting and dimmer policy on fake IDs. The faded rainbow flag on the door Dustin had expected, the amount of people crowded inside he hadn’t. It’s all the same to him, really, especially when the drinks are cheap and the people are a lot nicer than they can be at the nerd gatherings at Cal Tech. 

The hard part is Will, only Will.

Will, with his hair sliding down over his forehead, sweat beading on his neck, laughing with his friends, foot tapping rhythmically in place when he’s not dancing. The shy grin when a drag queen drapes her feather boa around his neck on the dancefloor, how he gives her a proper spin around the room the way his mom taught him before his first ever formal. The way he lets his friend Benji buy him drinks and touch his waist.

About an hour into it, Kate, Dustin’s second-favorite Pomona student, buys him a drink. “You look like you need it,” she says.

Dustin doesn’t say anything.

She nudges him with her elbow. “C’mon,” she says.

“Yeah,” he says. “I need it. Thanks.”

“Come _on_ , how long have you been into him? Will never even said you were into guys.”

“He doesn’t know,” Dustin says miserably into his glass.

Her expression softens. 

“And you can’t tell him,” Dustin continues. “Please.”

“I won’t,” she says. 

It’s only moments later when Will comes sidling up to Dustin, already glistening with sweat and body glitter, eyes shining with joy. “C’mon, you have to come dance,” he says.

“Yeah, alright,” Dustin says, downing the rest of his drink in one go. It drowns his self-consciousness enough to hit it off with Will’s friends on the dance floor, and Kate is extra nice to him all night.

It almost doesn’t hurt when he looks over at three in the morning, about to ask Will if they can go home, and sees Will kissing Benji.

-

**Chicago, July 5th 1994**

Steve takes a deep draught of his beer when the music at the bar switches seamlessly from _TNT_ to Madonna. He looks instinctively to Billy, ready for the outrage that move ought to provoke, but Billy doesn't seem to have noticed. He's drinking hard cider tonight, something he barely ever does in front of other people because it's just "too girly". He’s lucky enough, or smart enough, to not have ever said that in front of Robin.

Steve's train of thought halts directly. Robin. He should have called Robin. Even if she's feeling as blank and depressed as Steve is right now, she's almost always able to cheer Billy up.

A sudden laugh draws Steve's attention over towards the dimly lit dancefloor- really just the patch of floor clear of tables and chairs - where Dustin has somehow conned Will into dancing. 

At least, Steve thinks that's what's happening.

It just seems weird. Will has more reason than any of them to be terrified, to be angry, to be hiding under his bed like Steve wants to be right now. But there he is, half a head taller than Dustin, undeniably making the T-shirt-tucked-into-jeans look work, smiling broadly, his eyes crinkled up in the corners.

It's like he doesn't care.

It's like pushing and pulling Dustin around in something Steve vaguely thinks might be a cha-cha makes him so goddamn happy he doesn't care about the new rip in the fabric of reality headed their way.

Steve glances over to Billy. He wonders, briefly, if he could get Billy to dance with him like that. 

Billy takes another deep sip of his cider and Steve suppresses the idea. It took them the better part of two years to be open about their relationship with their friends. Neither of them is comfortable being out around strangers or their colleagues. Even at a bar like this, with drag shows on alternate Fridays, they only really touch when it's crowded. When the bar is filled from wall to wall and the room is so heavy with smoke, alcohol and the tangy, dusty smell of the fog machine that no one would think it was anything but coincidence, their bodies up against each other on the dancefloor.

It makes something go tight and bitter in Steve's chest to see Will and Dustin, of all people, be so shameless and uninhibited. Steve's been in love with Billy for nearly a decade at this point, but he's not the one showing it off on the dancefloor, because it's the Tuesday after Independence Day and the bar is too well-lit and empty.

"Are you sure this is what Will needs?" he asks Dustin skeptically when Dustin comes to the bar for a refill on his cider and Will's margarita. 

His resentment must read in his tone, because Dustin levels him with a look that makes Steve feel even more like an asshole.

"Will needs time to process," Dustin says, like he's the one who studied psychology and not Will. "And this is what he wanted to do tonight."

Steve looks back over at the dancefloor. Will and Max are shimmying back and forth to C&C Music Factory, laughing hysterically.

"Listen, if you guys aren't feeling up for it, you can leave anytime." Dustin says, way too close to Steve's ear and smelling strongly of alcohol.

"We're fine," Steve lies.

Dustin gives him another look. "I’m just saying. If you’re not okay, you’re not okay. Will's not going to notice. When he's like this, he's not really ready to be in anyone else's headspace."

“We’ll be fine,” Steve says, which may or may not be a lie. “Go on, get back out there.” 

Dustin gives him a smile, a too-heavy pat on the shoulder, and wanders back to his friends.

Steve wonders how often Dustin’s had to accept that Will isn’t ready to understand him.

Steve also wonders, not for the first time, how things changed so drastically between Will and Dustin in California. When he thinks of Will and Dustin, he thinks of them at thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, begging rides to the movies or the arcade off him. He thinks of them at sixteen, seventeen, sleeping over on his and Billy’s couch in their first, tiny, apartment, hungry for any experience outside of Hawkins. He thinks of them at eighteen, packing up Steve’s old car and driving off towards California. He talked to them every other week while they were there, saw them on holidays, but for some reason, he hadn’t registered how different they became while Steve wasn’t watching.

The Dustin he remembers was the smartest kid he knew, intensely vulnerable and terrified of rejection to boot, and he covered it up sloppily with excessive swearing and caustic humor. The Dustin that moved to Chicago the day before yesterday is still easily the smartest person Steve knows. He still swears, like, a lot. He carries his vulnerability like a shield now, though, instead of trying to hide what can’t be hid, openly in touch with how he feels and how everyone else feels. Steve’s always admired that about him, and it’s like now he admires it about himself.

The Will he remembers was a shy, withdrawn kid with a biting sense of humor when you could draw it out of him, a knack for art and a knack for calling people on their bullshit that always surprised Steve, because he never really expected it out of Will. This Will, the Will dancing carelessly with his arms over his head, isn’t so much shy as he is quiet, isn’t so much withdrawn as he is determined to do what he wants.

Steve wonders if Max and Lucas see the difference in them, too. If they noticed it last year, or the year before already. It’s not like Max and Lucas stayed the same. He’s always liked Max’s fierceness, her poise, and the older she’s gotten, the more she’s learned to refine her temper into humor and confidence. As for Lucas, the sensitivity that used to cause arguments in the Party every other week is still there, but he’s slower to react to it than he used to be and he and Max understand each other so well by now they hardly ever scream their arguments.

Maybe it’s normal to them, that everyone’s different.

Maybe Steve just didn’t want to accept they all grew up.

“I feel so old,” he says into his beer.

Billy snorts. “That’s ‘cause you are, princess.”

Steve makes a face at him.

“Real mature.”

“You sure you’re okay being here?”

Billy shrugs. “What else are we gonna do?”

Steve doesn’t have an answer for that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ignoring your encroaching anxiety by drinking and avoiding your problems? I wonder where I got that idea. Oh wait, it's 2020.
> 
> (Will and Dustin were both too drunk to narrate the last section)
> 
> Chapter title is from "Cringe" by Matt Maeson. 
> 
> Join me on Saturday, when our heroes finally start to sift through their collective trauma and react.


	6. stop my hands from shaking (something in my mind’s not making sense)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Hey, Jonathan, it’s Billy,” Billy says. 
> 
> “Oh, hi.”
> 
> Billy really wishes Nancy had answered the phone. He and Jonathan are more the type of friends who sit quietly together listening to music.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: referenced vomiting as a result of alcohol use, swearing, talking about trauma.

**Chicago, July 6th 1994**

Billy calls Jonathan at eight in the morning, when he’s been lying awake in bed for two hours and can’t even try to feign sleep any longer. 

The expression ‘death warmed over’ has never made a lot of sense to Billy; at his lowest points in life, he hurt too much to be dead. Right now, though, he’s so cold and numb he’s starting to feel like a corpse someone put in a microwave. 

“Hello, this is Jonathan Byers,” Jonathan says when he picks up the phone.

He says it every time, even though he must know the Chicago area code by now. It’s like he memorized his response to a ringing phone when he was a kid and it’s too late to change his script.

“Hey, Jonathan, it’s Billy,” Billy says. 

“Oh, hi.”

Billy really wishes Nancy had answered the phone. He and Jonathan are more the type of friends who sit quietly together listening to music.

“Uh, congratulations,” he says, for lack of a decent segue into _the government told us someone might rip a hole in the space-time continuum, you know, again_.

“Thanks,” Jonathan says. “And sorry.”

“The fuck are you sorry for?”

“I’m not,” Jonathan admits. “But everyone I’ve talked to since it happened has been really angry we didn’t invite them to the wedding.”

“I thought you just went to city hall,” Billy says, phone clenched between his cheek and his shoulder while he gets the coffee machine going. Steve will be hungover when he wakes up.

“We did.”

“No offense, but I wouldn’t have wanted to drive all the way to New York to watch a twenty-minute ceremony in a government building,” Billy says, omitting that he might have done it anyway just to watch Nancy Wheeler finally be taken comprehensively off the market. He likes her, he does, but he still wishes that Steve didn’t put quite so much stock into her opinion.

Jonathan laughs nervously. “It was actually only ten minutes,” he says. “And we had to wait in line for half an hour before.”

“What an event.”

“That’s what we thought. But Nancy’s mom is really upset.”

Billy runs through a whole slew of snappy answers in his head about how lonely Karen Wheeler must be, now, trapped in Hawkins and her unfulfilling marriage, her last kid getting ready to leave the nest. “Maybe Mike will let her make a big thing out of it,” he settles on saying.

“Yeah, maybe,” Jonathan says. “I don’t think Hopper will do any wedding planning for El.”

“That, I would pay money to attend.” Billy says. He gets the filter straightened in the coffee machine and turns it on. “Listen—”

“Did something happen with Will?” Jonathan blurts.

“What?” Billy asks. “No, why?” _Unless you count him getting so drunk he threw up in a trashcan on the way home_ , he adds mentally, pretty sure Will won’t thank him for revealing that little tidbit. 

“I just thought you guys were helping them move this week. And, uh, usually Steve is the one who calls. So I thought something might be…”

“An FBI agent showed up two days ago to tell us they think someone is trying to reopen the gate,” Billy says.

“ _Fuck_.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you okay?”

Billy’s surprised by the surge of affection he feels suddenly for Jonathan Byers, who could have asked if Will was alright (Billy’s pretty sure he’s not), and instead asked Billy himself. “Not really,” he admits. 

“Fuck,” Jonathan repeats.

“Yeah,” Billy says again. “Steve says he has a few leads, from work. But he said it was more your kind of thing than his, so we wanted to ask—”

“We’ll be in Chicago tonight,” Jonathan says.

-

**Hawkins, May 23rd 1986**

Jonathan tugs uncomfortably at his tie. It’s too tight.

It would be too tight in any state but off.

He hasn’t worn this suit in a year and a half, since he needed it to take pictures at Will’s Snow Ball. It’s kind of tight around the shoulders. It’s making him really self-conscious, to wear it for his own school dance. For Will, sure, he’ll wear the suit, he’ll take the pictures, he’ll drink the punch. Doing it for himself feels phony.

Sighing, he shakes off the vestiges of Holden Caulfield, because Nancy calls him pretentious when he says things like that, and rings the doorbell at Steve’s house. 

Robin answers the door in shorts and a t-shirt, cheesy pop-rock blaring through the house behind her. 

“Hi,” she says. “What are you doing here?”

He smiles awkwardly – he knows he’s awkward all the time, but it’s worse when he notices himself being awkward while it happens instead of three hours later – and says, “I wanted to see if you and Billy were going to Prom. We’re going to the diner, first. You could come.”

Really, Nancy wanted to see if they were going to Prom, a last-minute reminder that Billy might not have anyone to go with besides Tommy H. and Carol, a fate worse than death. He’s still not exactly their closest friend, but he did almost die to save the world last year, and if he wants to go to Prom, they should make him feel welcome.

Robin looks down at herself. “I think it’s kind of late for me to get a dress,” she says.

Jonathan laughs a little. “Okay,” he says. “Just checking.”

“Nancy sent you, right?” Robin says. “Some sort of outreach project for nerds.”

“Uh, I wouldn’t call Billy a nerd,” Jonathan hedges.

“That’s just ‘cause you don’t know him well enough,” Robin mutters. “Thanks, but we’re good. We’re doing an anti-Prom in Steve’s living room.”

“What, just the three of you?” Jonathan asks. 

“Yeah,” Robin says, belligerent like he’s going to have a problem with that. “Don’t believe me?”

Jonathan really doesn’t care, but it’s too late, she’s turned around and walked down the hallway towards the living room, beckoning for Jonathan to follow her. They peer in through the door from the hallway. There are balloons bobbing around the room, Jonathan notes, and streamers hanging from the lamp. 

Then, he looks back at the center of the room, the bit his brain skipped straight over when he first saw it, where all the furniture and has been pushed aside, where Billy and Steve are dancing in their socks.

Billy’s arms are slung around Steve’s neck, Steve’s hands low on his waist, and it’s clear this was Steve’s idea based on how he’s crooning _I don’t wanna lose your love ton---iiiight_ with the song, bopping his head up and down, hair bouncing.

Billy’s looking at him like he’s a total idiot, and also like Billy will love him forever.

Jonathan catches Robin’s eye, jerks his head back towards the entrance.

“Please don’t tell anyone,” she says when he’s opened the door already, intent on getting out of a place where he’s not supposed to be. She’s more earnest than he’s seen her before, even sitting in the back of his car speeding away from an interdimensional monster. “I shouldn’t have let you in.”

“I wouldn’t,” Jonathan assures her, almost insulted she thinks he would. 

“Okay.” She wraps her arms around her middle tightly, looks away. It’s his cue to leave.

“Put on some better music for them,” Jonathan says. “That’s, like, the least romantic song.”

Robin snorts, and then seems to catch herself and stop the laugh before it gets too loud. “Steve has the worst taste in music,” she says.

Jonathan agrees – has agreed since he got to know Steve as a person and not just as Nancy’s ex-boyfriend – but all he says is, “It’s good they have you. To, uh, to help him with that.”

-

**Chicago, July 6th 1994**

Robin’s sitting on the couch, paging through a book in Cyrillic lettering, when Steve gets back from work. The tips of her hair have become purple at some point in the last two days. “How’s Clara?” He asks her, letting himself collapse onto the free end of the couch. It was always going to be a shit day at work, even if he hadn’t woken up miserable, hungover and half an hour too late to eat breakfast.

Robin shrugs. “She’s fine.”

“Are you guys…”

“We’re still on,” Robin says. She hasn’t looked up from her book. “But the last time she dumped me, it was because she felt like I was keeping secrets from her. I’m sure this will help tons.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve says.

Robin shrugs again. She doesn’t say it’s not his fault, probably because it kind of is his fault. If Steve hadn’t dragged her into decoding a secret Russian transmission nine years ago, she would never have known. She probably wouldn’t be Steve’s friend, she might not even be in Chicago, and she definitely wouldn’t be getting a Ph.D. in Russian Language and Literature.

“I invited everyone over for dinner,” Billy says from the hallway. “We’re having nachos.”

“Do you need help?” Steve asks.

“No.”

Steve gets up to help him.

He chops cilantro in silence while Billy makes the queso – he hasn’t let Steve do it ever since the time Steve suggested mayonnaise when they ran out of sour cream – and wonders if he should apologize again.

“Did you at least find out _anything?_ ” Billy asks abruptly.

“I have a list of names,” Steve tells him. The facts. He’ll concentrate on the facts. “One of them was involved in an insider trading case I worked on last year, that’s what got me started. He wasn’t working on anything to do with…all this. But there’s a handful of Hawkins Lab ex-employees who list their place of work as a government building in East Garfield Park.”

Billy’s brow furrows. “There are government buildings in East Garfield Park?”

“I couldn’t find any besides the post office,” Steve says. “As far as I can tell, the address is just an empty storefront. I tried calling the phone number they listed for it, too, but I got rerouted to a private security agency. I asked around the official channels got some documentation on what the government is doing there, but I couldn’t make sense of it. Dustin said it was some sort of brain chemistry experiment…thing.”

Billy stops stirring for a second, waiting for Steve to finish.

“That’s it.” Steve moves on to chopping bell peppers and tomatoes.

“What do you mean, that’s it? That’s bullshit.”

Steve swallows. “Yeah,” he says. “It is. I mean, there’s other stuff, but it’s a lot less tangible. There are a lot of missing person’s reports, but they were all labelled unsuspicious by the local precinct, you know, a lot of young women in households that social services had been to more than once. One or two were pregnant, that’s a pretty normal time to decide to get out of an abusive relationship. I got some rumors of people saying they saw some middle-aged white guys in suits acting fishy in the area, but it’s East Garfield Park. People weren’t talking to me. I was the middle-aged white guy in a suit. I tried my contact in the FBI, too, before that asshole showed up here. He said he didn’t know anything.”

“So he lied,” Billy says, turning back to the pot and stirring aggressively. Steve mourns that he’s now apparently old enough that Billy doesn’t protest him calling himself middle-aged.

“Or it’s above his paygrade,” Steve says. “I could get my whole department disbanded if I push it.”

“You could get yourself fired, too.”

“I could get myself in prison for breaking the clauses of the NDA I signed in 1985.”

“Okay.” Billy pulls the pot off the stove and rummages in the drawer under the oven for the big tray. “Pass me those chips?”

Steve wipes his hands on his pants and reaches for the Tostitos. “Okay?”

“I get it,” Billy says. “What you were doing and why you didn’t tell me. I’m not, like, thrilled about it.”

“Why would you be?” Steve asks. “It was stupid of me.”

Billy snorts and shakes his head. 

“I would have told you the second I had something to tell,” Steve says. “I swear.”

Billy clasps his shoulder briefly before he rips open the bag to start pouring the chips onto the tray.

“We’re okay?” Steve asks a little desperately.

“Uh-huh,” Billy says, pulling every can of pinto beans they own out of the cupboard. “You think Max will notice if we sneak some black beans in there?”

“Can you, um,” Steve says. “Can you—”

Turning to him, Billy must see something of how shitty, how guilty Steve’s still feeling, because he rolls his eyes and grasps Steve’s face between his hands. “We’re fine,” Billy says, and kisses him on the lips with a loud, smacking sound. “Stop worrying. And tell me this shit sooner next time.”

Steve wants to say something about there not being a next time, but he was also pretty sure there wasn’t going to be a this time until it started, so he lets it go. 

“Max will definitely taste black beans,” he says. “She’s like a bloodhound.”

Billy sighs. “You think six cans of pinto is enough?”

Steve frowns, calculating in his head. “That’s, what, fourteen ounces per person? I don’t know. Lucas and Dustin can eat a _lot_. When will Jonathan and Nancy be here?”

“Late,” Billy says. “Too late to eat with us.”

“Guess we’ll have to risk it.”

“You guys done with the heart to heart yet?” Robin calls from the living room. “I was promised dinner.”

“She’s in a mood,” Billy murmurs, low enough that only Steve can hear it.

“She’s worried we’ll fuck things up for her with Clara again.”

Billy swallows heavily. “If we could find her a girlfriend who knew about Hawkins…” he starts.

“Yeah,” Steve says. 

The train of thought is blessedly interrupted by the doorbell and the advent of four hungover assholes. Only Will looks somewhat unphased, and Steve’s pretty sure that’s because he threw up all the toxins last night. Max is wearing sunglasses. 

“Work was the worst today,” she declares, throwing herself into her usual chair at the table in the living room. “Seriously, thank god you guys are cooking or we’d have had to order pizza.”

“You work at a coffee shop,” Steve feels the need to point out. “You can drink coffee and eat snacks literally all day.”

“That would be a great paycheck,” she says, even though she earns twice as much over the summer because she doesn’t have to go to class.

“How’s the apartment looking?” Billy asks Dustin, probably because he doesn’t want to hear Max talk about her job again.

Dustin groans, settling his head on the table. “We got the closet set up today,” he says. “It only nearly killed me twice.”

“So dramatic,” Will says fondly.

“You’re the one who nearly dropped it on me,” Dustin retorts.

“Do you need any help with dinner?” Lucas asks, because between the four of them, only one at a time can have manners. For his sins, Billy makes Lucas set the table.

They all settle down once there’s food in front of them. It’s the first real meal they’ve gotten to have together since Will and Dustin moved, and Steve can’t quite bring himself to interrupt it with serious talk. His grandma on his ma’s side used to say there was magic in a family meal, and Steve’s never really been able to forget that even if at surface value, he knows it’s the kind of thing every Italian American grandma likes to say. He thinks it’s one of those things that can be true in metaphor.

Will tells them about the creepy motel he and Dustin stayed at during the drive from LA, and how the guy at the desk had been in the middle of a phone conversation when they were checking out in which he only responded by naming the weights of different jars in pounds and then in the metric system. 

“Man,” Lucas says. “Only white people would stay at that place more than once.”

“Someday they’ll make a documentary about all the heroin he’s smuggling in his mom’s jam jars, and then they’ll come and interview us,” Dustin responds, still munching on the last of the chips.

“Ooh, heroin smuggler,” Will says, snapping his fingers toward Dustin. “That’s one for the fridge.”

“Already put it on this morning,” Dustin says.

When Will excuses himself to the bathroom moments later, Steve turns to Dustin. “Is he okay?”

Dustin shrugs. “Ask him yourself.”

“I just mean, he was kind of out of it last night,” Steve says.

Lucas snorts. “He was totally plastered last night. We had to carry him up the stairs to your apartment.”

“Like you’ve never been drunk,” Dustin says, still more occupied with the last crumbs of dinner than with the conversation.

“It kind of seemed like he’s…not dealing?” Max suggests carefully.

Dustin looks up at them, and notices for the first time that they’re all staring at him. “I mean, are any of us?” He asks, which is kind of fair. 

“Only one of us ended last night on all fours in front of the toilet,” Lucas says.

“Yeah,” Dustin says. “He told you he was gonna get trashed. It’s literally what he said when we left the house.”

“That doesn’t seem healthy,” Steve says, because he has to. They’re his kids.

Dustin purses his lips in a way that reminds Steve eerily of his mother. “Is it healthy to sit around here and pretend nothing’s happened? Is it healthy to ask me, behind his back, how he’s doing instead of asking him yourself? I’m not his keeper.”

“No, you’re—”

Will comes back in. Dustin smiles at him weakly. 

“What’s going on?” He asks, looking around.

“We’re kind of worried about you,” Lucas says. “With everything going on.”

“What’s everything?” Will asks. He’s calm, but it’s the kind of forced calm Steve knows from Billy, from when he’s trying not to lose his shit.

“You know,” Robin says, still caustic, “The government stooges, the potential rip in the fabric of reality, the end of all things as we know it. Again.”

“Oh,” Will says. “And?”

“And,” Max picks up the baton from her husband, looking like she knows it’s a bad idea even as she says it, “It kind of seemed last night like you weren’t…reacting to that all that well.”

“Right,” Will says. “Because I’m very traumatized.”

“Well,” Lucas says. “I mean. Yeah?” He reaches over to pat lightly at Will’s shoulder, but he stops immediately when Will remains frozen stiff.

“Good to know where we’re all at,” Will says, and offers no more explanations or answers.

Billy, who’s been leaning back in his chair, digging grooves into the carpet, swings forward abruptly and sets his elbows on the table. “Jonathan and Nancy are coming here tonight.”

“I thought we agreed it would look _really bad_ to the government stooges if they did that!” Max argues.

“We had some ideas we needed them for,” Billy says, covering effortlessly for Steve like he wasn’t still pissed about it less than an hour ago. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

“Great,” Will says. “Then you don’t need us here now.” He pushes back his chair and goes to put on his shoes. Dustin follows a little helplessly.

“Nine-thirty tomorrow,” Steve says. 

Dustin gives him the A-OK hand signal, and then the door crashes shut behind him and Will.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A wild Jonathan POV appears.
> 
> Chapter title and the song referenced in the flashback is "Your Love" by the Outfield, a very very cheesy 80s song that is also kind of weird and creepy, lyrically. 
> 
> This is the chapter where we start to hit the issues inherent in me not having ever been to Chicago and also not living in the US. Everything local and geographic is therefor research based, and my research tells me that in the 80s and 90s, East Garfield Park was a particularly run-down part of Chicago, with all the awful socio-economic and racial things that entails in the USA. If I'm fucking up in terms of representation, I'm sorry!
> 
> On Tuesday, I'll be posting my favorite chapter in this whole fic and I'm super excited about it.


	7. starts at your skin (so new)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will scrubs a tired hand across his face. “It’s late, Dustin. Go back to sleep.”
> 
> Dustin sits down next to him, slips a hand around his waist. “Let me help?”
> 
> “There’s nothing you can _do_ ,” Will says, frustrated. 
> 
> “Well, then let me _in_.” Dustin hooks his chin over Will’s shoulder. It digs into the nerves there, the hand at Will’s waist still firm and hot. Will remembers how Lucas had touched his shoulder, just hours ago, like Will would break if he used even a hint of pressure.
> 
> “I’m just…I keep waiting, for it all to start again. It’s been so long since everything happened. I thought I was rid of all this.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Anal sex, light bondage, blink-and-you'll-miss-it BDSM-light dynamics, oral sex, swearing, underage drinking

**Chicago, July 7th 1994**

“Will,” Dustin says, soft. “Will, please.”

He flicks the light switch on and Will winces. It was so dark and quiet before. Will hadn’t been able to hear anything besides his own thoughts for hours, since he left Dustin lying in their bed and came to sit on the couch, where he can look out at the endless lights of a city, even if it’s not the city he’s used to.

Will scrubs a tired hand across his face. “It’s late, Dustin. Go back to sleep.”

Dustin sits down next to him, slips a hand around his waist. “Let me help?”

“There’s nothing you can _do_ ,” Will says, frustrated. 

“Well, then let me _in_.” Dustin hooks his chin over Will’s shoulder. It digs into the nerves there, the hand at Will’s waist still firm and hot. Will remembers how Lucas had touched his shoulder, just hours ago, like Will would break if he used even a hint of pressure.

“I’m just…I keep waiting, for it all to start again. It’s been so long since everything happened. I thought I was rid of all this.”

Dustin doesn’t say anything, but he tugs Will tight against him.

“What if it’s never over?” Will asks. “What if I’m just going to be scared forever?” There’s a dry, painful swell behind his eyes, where tears want to come but can’t.

“You won’t,” Dustin says.

“You don’t know that.”

“You won’t, because I won’t let you,” Dustin says. “You’d be totally wasted on that kind of life, Will Byers.”

Will chokes on a sob, deep in his throat, and lets himself slump against Dustin. 

“I’m serious,” Dustin tells him. “You’re going to get your degree, and then you’re going to save a whole bunch of kids from ever feeling as scared as you did, because you took all the shit life piled on you and you stayed nice. That’s probably the bravest thing I can think of.”

“And if the Upside-Down opens up again?” 

“Let it try,” Dustin says. “We’ve kicked its ass three times so far, I don’t like its chances.”

Will turns in his grasp, then, and kisses him.

Kissing Dustin has always been easy, ever since the second time, in the cramped bathroom of their LA apartment. Then, it was easier than talking for Will, easier to show that he was interested in what Dustin was offering without playing his hand fully, easier to kiss than to admit how much he cared and mess with an already decade-long friendship.

Now, two years down the line, it’s like coming home.

Dustin is still soft and warm from sleep, and he lets Will push him back into the couch cushions easily, opening to Will’s legs slotting between his, Will’s arms either side of his head.

He makes a surprised noise against Will’s lips, but his hands come up to clutch at Will’s back.

Will pulls away from him long enough to ask, “You want?”

“Yeah,” Dustin says, and pulls him back down. 

They kiss like that, legs entwined, bodies close, hands wandering, for long moments. Dustin’s got his hands down the back of Will’s sleep pants, pulling them down till he’s naked down to his knees, which would be pretty embarrassing if Dustin were anyone else.

“Can I get the handcuffs?” He asks against Dustin’s lips.

Dustin grins. 

Will strips off the rest of the way on the way to the bedroom, pulls the suitcase full of sex shit out from under the bed, where they’d left it after moving. He grabs the handcuffs and, after a second’s rummage, the lube and a towel. 

He’d discovered, when he was nineteen and in his first relationship, how viscerally he hated the thought of giving up control, of being physically tied or incapacitated in any way. Just another thing the Upside Down had stolen from him, just another thing that reminded him of the burning-hot smell of radiator on flesh and that fucking song by the Clash he hasn’t been able to listen to since. The relationship had deteriorated quickly afterwards, in no small part because Will had been unwilling to even try to give up any control and because he hadn’t been able to tell Benji why. 

He’d been twenty-one and dating Dustin when they figured out that Dustin had no such hang-ups, had in fact gotten a few wires crossed about sensory deprivation at an impressionable age, and that while Will had no interest in being tied up, he had a lot of interest in being the one doing the tying.

Dustin’s waiting for him, naked, when he gets back, arms crossed over his head. 

“Good boy,” Will tells him.

Dustin preens.

He doesn’t do much, just cuffs Dustin’s hands together and tells him to keep them there. It’s late, after all, past two, and he’s not looking to drag this out. He remembers when he tried that, though, Dustin spread-eagled on the mattress of their bed in LA, shifting restlessly in the late afternoon sunlight when Will wouldn’t let him come. Will licks his lips.

Dustin squirms a little closer to him.

He starts at Dustin’s shoulders. They’re a sensitive area for Dustin, physically and emotionally. Will likes to remind him, with his mouth, that he likes Dustin and always has. He takes his time. When he gets to Dustin’s nipples, Dustin’s fully hard for him.

“You gonna tease me all night?” Dustin asks him.

“Got a problem with that?” 

He bites a nipple.

Dustin jerks, hard, but he keeps his hands in place. “No,” he says, a lot higher than he probably meant to. “Just asking. You know. Staying informed.”

“Uh-huh,” Will says. He stays where he is for a while, sucking and nipping at Dustin’s nipples, just to annoy Dustin even as he’s doing his level best to turn him on.

He moves on to licking and sucking lightly at Dustin’s dick when he wants Dustin really distracted. Dustin’s a visual guy, he reacts pretty strongly to images. Sometimes it’s too much for him and he just can’t look, keeps his head tilted back, staring at the ceiling. It’s really flattering.

Will uses the distraction to get himself ready, the hand not steadying Dustin’s dick as he teases it with little kitten licks fingering himself open. It’s not Will’s favorite way to do it – his favorite way is Dustin tucked up behind him, doing it himself and whispering in Will’s ear – but it’ll do for now, quick and dirty and not enough. It’s worth the surprise on Dustin’s face when Will kneels up, one leg on either side of his hips, and settles down on Dustin’s dick.

“Fuck,” he gets out. “Fuck, Will, fuck.”

Will pushes down against the twinge of an insufficient prep job until Dustin’s all the way in, until he can tilt his pelvis back and forth until he’s got the right angle. 

“You’re gorgeous,” Dustin tells him. Dustin runs his mouth a lot, and he’s always honest unless he has a good reason not to be, but there’s a quality to the way he talks when he’s turned on and at Will’s mercy, like it’s being pulled from him against his better judgment and he can’t stop talking. “You’re so good to me, just, _uh_ , just like that, c’mon, Will, please, please, yes, you’re so _good_ , fuck, just _use_ me.”

Will leans down to kiss him, to help him stem the tide, because as good as it makes Will feel to hear him talk, Dustin gets self-conscious about it. He sets a quick rhythm, hitching his hips as tight as he can to keep Dustin grinding against his prostate, sending sparks up his spine.

He sighs in pleasure, reaches for his own cock, hard against his stomach. Dustin’s hips hitch up and Will groans.

“Yeah?” Dustin asks.

“Mm,” Will says. “Yeah, you can move. Just don’t come.”

“Uh-huh,” Dustin says. He plants his feet, knees against Will’s back, and Will strokes himself off slow at first, then faster to match Dustin’s pace. He pushes himself down harder and harder, the couch shifting minutely under them at each thrust. 

“Fuck,” Will says when he comes, shooting out into his fist and dripping down onto Dustin. He stills while it pulses through him, sharp and electrifying.

Dustin’s waiting when he’s come down, but his whole body is shivering, tight with the urge to move.

“Good,” Will praises. “You can keep going, now.”

“Can I…” Dustin gasps out, already fucking back into Will where he’s oversensitive and sore.

“Yeah,” Will says. “Come for me.”

Dustin’s eyes clench tight when he comes and his hands spasm on the handcuffs. He lays still for a long moment as it ends, stomach clenching with it. Will admires him, sweaty and pleased and unraveling just for Will.

He lets Dustin slip out of him, softening, and reaches for the clip on the handcuffs, releasing Dustin’s hands. 

“Shower,” Dustin says muzzily. “Shower and sleep.”

They do just that.

-

**Hawkins, July 3rd 1992**

They agreed, when they drove to Hawkins for Independence Day, that it was too soon to tell everyone about their relationship. They’d only been dating for a little over a month, and they already lived together. It seemed like something people would get skeptical over (and by people, Dustin especially meant their mothers). 

It’s strange to him, how easily they can slip into their roles as the perpetually single Party members. Mike and El are completely back together after the longest off phase of their relationship, El having finally decided to move to the East Coast to be with him when school starts up again in September. Lucas and Max have been _married_ for eight months. 

Sitting around the bonfire pit somewhere between the treeline and the Byers’ house the day before the holiday, Mike makes a token effort to ask Dustin about the girl he brought to Lucas and Max’s wedding as a date. They’d been together nearly six months at that point, and he’d thought it could work. Then he’d watched Will swing-dance with Billy in formal wear, laughing his ass off, and he’d known he was lying to himself again. He’d broken it off with Stacy two weeks later.

Last week, Will had told him, under the covers of Dustin’s bed, how relieved he had been when Dustin told him he was single again, and how he hadn’t understood why.

“I think,” Will had whispered, breath hot on Dustin’s jaw, “I think I’ve been really blind about this.”

Dustin had laughed low in his belly and rolled on top of Will to kiss him some more.

Now, they’re sitting on either side of the fire, Will sipping a beer Dustin got him from the cooler ten minutes ago, Dustin’s still closed by his feet. Dustin looks over to Will for a split second before he answers Mike, says, “We broke up in November, I told you that.”

“Oh yeah,” Mike says, “I, uh. I forgot.” 

It’s a not very tactful way to say that he lost track.

Max snorts even less tactfully.

“What was wrong with her this time?” Lucas asks, the least tactfully. “Did she not read all the books in the Earthsea Cycle? Did she say Spiderman and Batman shouldn’t do a crossover?”

“They _should_ ,” Will says.

“But they can’t!” Dustin exclaims, momentarily derailed from having to talk about why none of his past relationships worked out. “That’s the whole issue. It’s the capitalist destruction of all the potential of the series that they hermetically seal off all the good superheroes from each other.”

“Well, I think Marvel and DC should just get over themselves and do a crossover,” Will says, leaning back against his log, head lolling up to look at the sky. “Batman could get Spiderman’s boss off his back.”

“Spiderman could teach Batman how to have a sense of humor,” Dustin agrees.

Mike doesn’t ask about Stacy again.

They hang around till the fire burns down, and then they head to their parents’ houses. It’s strange to be home without a curfew, without the feeling of learned helplessness left over from high school. Dustin knows he tends to slide back into the way he acted around his mom during school when he’s around, like he needs to take care of her and pretend to let her take care of him. 

He tiptoes past his mom’s room to his own, hoping she didn’t stay up too late worrying about him.

Two weeks, he reminds himself. Two weeks, and then they’re headed back to Cali.

He’s just throwing his clothes in the laundry basket when he hears a tapping at his window. He jerks around to see Will in front of it, smile on his face.

Will climbs in through the window, landing on Dustin’s bed with more grace than Dustin ever managed in school, when he used to come in through the window drunk at three in the morning, pretending his mom didn’t know full well he went out to parties all the time during the last two years of high school. He knows she was glad he found his footing, socially, despite how different he was, despite moving to Hawkins midway through elementary school, despite his mom working at the school as a guidance counselor. He could have probably used the door. He just didn’t want to test _how_ glad she was by having to run into her when he was shit-faced.

“Hey,” Will says, kneeling up on Dustin’s bed after he closes the window behind himself. He grabs Dustin into a hungry kiss. “How are you?”

“You just saw me,” Dustin points out, but he lets himself be pulled into further kisses anyway.

By the time they come up for air, they’re horizontal on the bed and Dustin’s pretty aware that he’s nearly naked and Will isn’t.

“That was weird, wasn’t it?” Will asks, looking up at the ceiling.

Dustin rolls over to be on his back beside Will. “Yeah,” he says. “I thought it would be harder to pretend nothing’s changed.”

“Nothing has changed for you,” Will points out. “I just pulled my head out of my ass.”

“Aw, come on,” Dustin says. “Lots changed for me.” He presses a kiss to Will’s jaw. “Like that.”

“That’s a pretty good change,” Will says, smiling over at him. 

Dustin says nothing but grabs for his hand.

“I’m sorry they’re such dicks about people you used to date,” Will says.

“You were the biggest dick about people I used to date.”

Will flushes a little. Dustin really wants to lick his neck, but this feels like a conversation they need to have. “I didn’t know I was jealous,” he says. “That was displacement. Mike and Lucas are just assholes.”

Dustin props himself up on his elbow. “It doesn’t really matter now,” he says. “I’m not really planning on dating anyone else.”

He catches Will’s smile – it’s gone in a second, but it reminds him intensely, painfully, of the way Will smiled at him when they used to pass notes in history class, happy, mischievous and a little bit smug. He remembers lying in this bed, thinking about Will’s smile.

“I can’t believe you never knew,” he blurts out. “I had such a crush on you, senior year.” In senior year of high school, in freshman year of college, in sophomore year of college, and most recently, through junior year of college, if Dustin’s being honest. If he’s being really honest, he talked up every new relationship he got himself into, ever girl he dated for more than a week, to distract their friends and to distract himself from how much he wished he could be good enough for Will. It’s no wonder they’re dicks about it. Dustin doesn’t like being lied to, either.

“I was missing out,” Will tells him, and the best thing is, he means it. He pulls Dustin in by the hair for more kissing. Somehow, Dustin ends up sprawled over Will, one knee between Will’s legs as they kiss. 

“Can I suck you off?” Will asks in his ear, and Dustin shudders all over.

It’s been kind of a shock to his system, how direct Will is about sex. Dustin’s only had a handful of partners, and he knows Will’s had a lot more, so he guesses it makes sense that Will is so open about it all. It’s weirdly romantic to Dustin, how clear Will is in what he wants. All of Dustin’s past relationships have been filled with awkward situations and long negotiations about when what physical step should be taken, in part because Dustin can’t shake the idea that he’s fundamentally undesirable. Will just…fast-forwards through that, because he knows what he wants and he knows _Dustin_ and when to let him talk and when to shut him up.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I’d like that.”

“Great,” Will says, and then he flips them over, presses a kiss to Dustin’s sternum and slides down his body.

“Son of a bitch,” Dustin moans out, digging the palms of his hands into his eyes. He can’t watch as Will slides his boxers down, as Will gets a hand around his dick and sets his lips to the head.

Will’s tongue draws a hot brand down his cock. His lips close tight around it, and Dustin looks down despite his better judgment. Will meets his gaze and Dustin has to look away immediately.

“Look at me,” Will says, low and intense like he gets in bed.

Dustin shifts his hips restlessly as Will gets his mouth back around Dustin. “I can’t,” he says, helplessly honest. “You look too good, I won’t last, I won’t, oh fuck do that again.”

Will does it again, draws his tongue in circles around the head of Dustin’s cock with his hand pumping the base slowly, spit slicking down and making the glide easier. He sucks, hard, tongue flicking against the head again, and Dustin really honestly hated every single guy he saw Will hook up with in the last three years and a few he didn’t even see, but there’s no denying Will is _good_ at this.

He’s making helpless noises, he knows, and saying a whole lot of really stupid stuff about how hot Will is, how good he is, how it’s never been like this before – it hasn’t – and Will hums around him, pleased. Dustin’s hips jerk up.

“Sorry, sorry,” he gasps, trying to lay flat despite the fact that he’s pretty sure he’s losing vital brain functions by the second.

Will draws back to say, “It’s okay, you can fuck my face a bit.”

He keeps his fist around the base, so Dustin isn’t in actual danger of choking him, but it’s the idea, the _concept_ , that makes Dustin moan, makes him fuck up just a little, makes him look down at Will again and feel his balls draw up.

“I’m gonna come soon,” he warns breathlessly.

Will doubles down, jerks him faster, flicks his tongue harder, and Dustin nearly cries, he’s so sensitive and so close.

When he comes, it’s a long rush of sensation, pouring through his whole body.

Will slides back up to lie next to him even as the last of the aftershocks jerk through Dustin’s dick, leftover come pooling in his belly button. 

“Oh my god,” Dustin groans, face hot with exertion, embarrassment, pleasure, who even knows.

Will licks his lips. “Liked that?” He asks.

“You…” Dustin trails off, and decides he can’t even put it into words, so he kisses Will instead, long and thorough, ignoring the unpleasant taste of his own come. He gropes down Will’s body, finds him hard and wet at the tip, fly already undone.

“I got impatient,” Will says. “You were really hot.”

Dustin literally can’t listen to Will say that. He grips Will’s cock the way he’s learned Will likes it, kind of tight and kind of rough, jerks him slow at first and then faster, pressing kisses to every bit of Will’s skin he can reach.

“Like that,” Will sighs against Dustin’s skin, “Just like that.”

Dustin draws his fingers down Will’s ribs, feeling Will shudder under his touch, and decides he really ought to repay the favor. 

“You don’t have to, I’m close,” Will tells him, but Dustin’s not having it, sinking to his knees by the side of the bed, pulling Will after him, pulling Will’s cock into his mouth. He doesn’t have Will’s finesse, it’s been three years since he did this and he didn’t particularly enjoy it at the time. It’s different with Will, though. Every soft, pleading sound Will makes spurs Dustin on, the way his hands clench on Dustin’s shoulders, not pushing, just overwhelmed, makes Dustin want to take him deeper and deeper. 

He can, is the thing, the one sexual trick he knows he’s got – he lets Will’s cock hit the back of his throat, sucks it tight up to his soft palate, the whole of it engulfed in his mouth.

“Jesus _fuck_ ,” Will grinds out. He gasps soundlessly and comes straight down Dustin’s throat.

It’s kind of a question of self-preservation to swallow.

He pulls off a second later, gasping for breath.

“Did I—was that…okay?” Will asks him, chest heaving.

Dustin grins at him.

Will flops back onto the bed. “Oh my god,” he says. “Oh my god, come here.” He squirms back against the wall and pulls Dustin back into bed to cuddle up to him. Dustin hits the bedside lamp on his way, plunging the room into darkness. The moon and the streetlights are the only illumination of Will’s face and if Dustin were more artistic, he’d want to photograph this moment, he’d want to paint it in oil or charcoal.

Will noses into Dustin’s shoulder, yawning broadly, and throws his arm over Dustin. “I should probably go home soon,” he says.

“Don’t,” Dustin says. 

“In two weeks, we can sleep in the same bed again,” Will says. “My mom’s gonna worry if I’m not there in the morning.”

Dustin sighs deeply, because he knows that, and he knows his mom would be the same. “If she knew you were biking home at this hour, she’d like it even less,” he points out.

Will snorts, a hot little exhale against Dustin’s rapidly cooling skin. “I bet she’d love that. _Hey mom, I know you get worried when I’m not home in the morning because it reminds you of that time I got kidnapped to an alternate dimension, but really, I got kidnapped biking home from Dustin’s at night, so you should just let me sleep there._ ”

The thought makes Dustin laugh. “Do you talk to her about it at all?” He asks.

“Not like that,” Will says. “Not like it’s over.”

Dustin runs his hands through Will’s hair, inhaling bonfire. 

“I only talk to you like that,” Will says.

-

**Chicago, July 7th 1994**

Will wakes up to an incessant ringing in his ears.

It takes him a moment to orient himself. He’s in Chicago, in the new apartment, and the ringing isn’t in his ears, it’s the door. He grabs his boxers off the floor and heads to the door, pulling them on. He opens the door, not the chain, peers through the crack, but when he sees it’s Lucas, he shuts the door again and undoes the chain before letting Lucas in.

“What are you doing here this early?” He asks.

Lucas looks personally insulted as he steps into the apartment. “It’s ten thirty,” he says. “We were supposed to meet at Steve and Billy’s an hour ago.”

“Oh,” Will says. “Right. Sorry. Had a hard time getting to sleep.”

Dustin chooses this moment to appear in the door of the bedroom, and he at least managed to find pants, but they don’t do a whole lot to hide the hickey Will sucked above his right nipple, or the absolute catastrophe that is his hair when he showers before sleep. “You coming back to bed?” He asks groggily.

“Lucas is here,” Will says.

Lucas is looking between them with utmost suspicion, and Will can see him track the other items of clothing, discarded around the living room, as well as the handcuffs they left on the couch and the lube they left on the coffee table.

He turns around to face the door, crosses his arms. “Just let me know when you’re ready.”

“No one asked you to come here,” Will points out, grabbing the incriminating evidence. Dustin winces visibly. “We’ll be over in, like, half an hour.”

“No can do,” Lucas says. “I’m supposed to come back with you or not at all. Steve was worried something happened.”

“There had better be coffee at Steve’s,” Will mutters, and goes to get dressed.

Dustin’s already halfway there, pretending that it doesn’t bother him at all that Lucas obviously knows they were fucking at some point in the recent past. 

“He’s known about us for like a year and a half,” Will points out after he’s dumped the handcuffs on the bed, pulling out the first t-shirt he can find and throwing it on over a pair of cut-off shorts.

“Yeah, but he’s never…” Dustin trails off. “You know. He and Mike get all weird about it.”

“I know,” Will says darkly. “You won’t even kiss me in front of them.”

“I just hate how awkward it gets,” Dustin says.

“So we’re gonna pretend to be just friends for the rest of our lives even though everyone knows we’re not because our other friends can’t grow up?”

Dustin is suspiciously silent, and when Will looks over at him, he’s holding his still rolled-up socks in his hand, staring at Will.

“What?”

“You said ‘the rest of our lives’,” Dustin says.

Will swallows heavily. “Yeah,” he says. “I did.”

“Okay,” Dustin says. “So, I’m going to pretend that’s not a big deal, yeah?”

Will means to give him a gentle kiss, just a little reassurance that Will meant it even if now is not the time to be having this discussion, but Dustin’s hand comes up to grasp the base of his skull heavily, dragging him close and tilting his head until they’re kissing properly and Dustin’s dropped his socks on the floor.

“Hey,” Lucas yells from outside. “I don’t know what you’re doing in there and I don’t want to, but you’d better do it fast.”

Dustin separates from Will to yell, “Screw you, Sinclair.”

He trudges out into the living room dutifully, though, forgetting about his socks entirely.

“What’s this even about?” He asks. “Like, have there been any actual developments?”

Lucas turns a little bit, keeping the couch carefully out of his eyeline because he’s a baby. “Nancy and Jonathan got in last night, and Steve says he has some ideas.”

“What kind of ideas?” Will asks. Steve’s a great person, but he’s not exactly who Will thinks of when it comes to ideas.

“He said he’s been working on something,” Lucas says. “Like, at his job.”

“Oh, fuck,” Dustin says.

Will raises an eyebrow at him.

“He told me about that,” Dustin admits. “He started looking into some of the Hawkins National Lab guys, he wanted me to explain some of the science stuff.”

“And you didn’t tell me because…?” Will asks.

“It was a really bad time? We were in the middle of planning the move. And I didn’t think it was important.”

“We had thirty hours on the road to talk,” Will points out. “You didn’t think it was important for me to know about Steve looking into the people who caused all this?”

Dustin rubs at the back of his neck. “Of course I did.”

Will stares at him.

“I didn’t want to worry you, okay?” Dustin says. “I was trying to be…considerate.”

“You were babying me,” Will says dully.

“I was not—”

“You were babying me and acting like I can’t take it when people bring up what happened to me. You know I hate that.”

“ _Will_ ,” Dustin says. “I never meant–”

“You did, though,” Will says through clenched teeth. “You did exactly the thing I’ve always told you I hate the most, you treated me like I’m too fucking fragile to handle shit, like I’m fucking Zombie Boy.”

“Will—”

“And then you go all _let me help, Will_ like we’re in this together.”

“We _are_ ,” Dustin says, his voice raised.

“No, we’re fucking not,” Will says. “Not if you’re keeping stuff from me and acting like you get to decide when you tell me the truth and when you distract me with sex.”

“ _You_ were the one who wanted to fuck instead of talking,” Dustin says, angry flush high on his cheeks. Will already knows this is going to be one of the fights he’ll be even more angry about later, when he remembers that Dustin made good points that he can’t agree with because he’s too proud.

“Guys,” Lucas says, sounding pained. “Is now really the time?”

“It’s never the fucking time with you around,” Dustin says, snide and cruel, and Will hates that he knows Dustin hates himself for it a little as soon as it’s out of his mouth. 

“Let’s go,” Will says, grabbing his keys off the table.

“Will, can we talk about this?”

“I don’t know, seems like you’re too considerate for that,” Will says and stalks out of the apartment.

He catches Lucas saying something to Dustin, and Dustin telling Lucas to shut the fuck up, but he’s too angry to care what exactly they’re saying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is from Vance Joy's "Lay it All On Me" 
> 
> And I swear after this chapter of intense emotional upheaval I am finally ready to pick up the plot next time...
> 
> Has anyone else ever had long, intense thoughts about how Will and Dustin are both the sons of kind of neurotic single moms and how that would lend itself to their relationship? Because, uh, I have. A lot. It didn't exactly make this fic explicitly, but it's something I was thinking about a lot while I was writing it.
> 
> Also, before anyone @s me, I know there is a Spiderman/Batman crossover but it was released after this fic takes place.


	8. don't punish me (for how I feel)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They eat breakfast in complete silence.
> 
> “Hey, guys?” Nancy asks eventually, wiping her mouth delicately with a napkin. “Haven’t Steve and Dustin been gone a really long time?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: discussions of discrimination based on race, class and sexuality, explicit sex, swearing, more of me pretending I know anything about Chicago

**Chicago, July 7th 1994**

Billy would charitably describe the atmosphere after Steve explains that he’s been doing some research on Hawkins National Lab as “bad.”

That is, Jonathan and Nancy are fine. Tired, after driving half the night to get here, but they have questions and ideas of what to do next.

Everyone else is barely talking.

Billy’s really not judging Steve for taking an out as soon as he can. It’s not even really an out – he needs to get his files on the lab goons from the office and tell his boss he’ll be out of the office chasing leads. Billy is judging Robin for claiming she owed them a meal and going out to get bagels. Billy had called in sick to work, himself, so he wasn’t exactly planning on going out to the bagel shop two doors down from his office, but still.

Steve took Dustin with him, saying he had a few more questions about the science side of things he needed help with that they might be able to figure out in the police archives.

Judging by the look on Will’s face, that’s why he’s not talking.

“Alright,” Nancy says, pulling out a notebook and setting it down next to her coffee cup. “What are our angles here?”

“Steve’s got a list of names,” Jonathan lists. “An address for an empty, locked up building, a phone number for a security company…”

“He must have some idea of what they’re doing there,” Will says. “Or he wouldn’t need Dustin.”

“Right,” Nancy says. “Good point.” She jots that down as well. “So, we’re going to need a phone book to find the home addresses for the lab workers. We should probably case the area, and someone should go look up the people from the lab in person.”

“Can’t we just call them?” Max asks.

Nancy shrugs. “You’re welcome to try. In my experience, it’s a lot harder for them to say no in person. Plus, even if they do, you never know what you might see.”

“Where’s the fake address?” Jonathan asks.

“Garfield Park,” Billy tells him. 

“What kind of area is that?”

“Not great,” Lucas says.

“Steve probably stuck out like a sore thumb,” Nancy muses. “He looks too much like a cop.”

“He looks too rich,” Billy adds.

Nancy peers over at Lucas. “Do you think you would be less conspicuous there?”

Lucas folds his arms. Behind his back, Max winces. “What, because I’m black?” He asks, belligerent.

“Yeah, Lucas,” Will snaps. “Obviously because you’re black.”

Lucas looks ready to snap back, but Max interrupts before he can. “Maybe if we go together,” she says. “I can do my best white trash. Make you look less educated.”

Billy remembers how they used to fight, when they were younger, about everything under the sun. Max would dump him for every insult he gave her, intended or not, but she was most sensitive about how well-off his family was, about how she struggled for her grades when it came easily to him. Billy knows, intimately, that in comparison, their family barely got by. If the housing market in Hawkins hadn’t crashed horribly after the slew of kids and teens going missing and the only big job provider in the area, the lab, starting to lay off people left and right, the Hargrove-Maxfield household would have been living in a trailer.

Lucas and his sister were the only black kids in Hawkins who lived in a house nicer than theirs.

It had taken Billy years – longer even than Max – to parse how lonely that might have been, to be too rich and too well-spoken to fit in with one crowd and too black to fit in with another. It probably hadn’t helped that all Lucas’s friends were white nerds.

Now is not the time, but Billy’s proud of how easy it is for Max, now, after the years of fights all through high school, to be so matter-of-fact about the differences in their families. More than that, he’s proud that she’s set aside her own shit enough to shield Lucas from having to admit himself, in front of all of them, that left to his own devices, he would probably have a hard time fitting in around black people who hadn’t shared his advantages growing up.

Lucas accepts it, from her, in a way he wouldn’t from anyone else. “Yeah, I guess,” he mutters.

“Great,” Nancy says. “Thanks.”

They sit in silence for a while. Nancy drums her fingers impatiently on the table. Billy’s about to go get more coffee started when she asks Will if he knows anything about the science aspect of it all.

“Dustin didn’t tell me anything,” he says. He doesn’t manage to hide how bitter he sounds.

“Oh my god, just get over it,” Lucas says.

Will closes his eyes. “Lucas, please shut the fuck up,” he says.

Jonathan’s taking a sip of his coffee, but he freezes, eyes snapping over between Lucas and Will. It’s like he hardly dares swallow.

“I’m just saying, we have more important problems than your relationship drama,” Lucas says. He says it like he’s calm. He says it like he’s right.

“And if it were up to you, we always would, isn’t that right,” Will says, not really asking.

Billy wonders if he really needs to be in the room for this.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just that I’m getting really fucking sick of you always acting like it’s a massive inconvenience to you, personally, that we’re in a relationship!”

“Maybe not everything is about your relationship,” Lucas says, loud enough to almost qualify as a yell.

“Maybe this is,” Will says, aping Lucas’s tone.

“Oh come on, like you two hashing out the weird details of your sex life has _anything_ to do with the Upside Down.” Lucas nose is wrinkled up and Billy’s not entirely sure where this segue came from, but he’s really not enjoying this conversation.

Jonathan looks like he sucked on a lemon.

“Grow up already,” Will says. “Sorry you had to acknowledge that two consenting adults in a relationship have sex sometimes.”

“You guys should be worrying about the FBI and the Mind Flayer, not that stuff!”

Will rolls his eyes. “Guess what, I can worry about more than one thing at once.”

“Guys,” Jonathan interjects, but he’s too quiet.

“Sure didn’t seem like that, before.” Lucas’s arms are crossed belligerently. This is what they need Steve for. Steve would roll up his sleeves and wade into this stupid fucking discussion like it actually matters and get them to leave their differences aside.

“You just can’t take acknowledging that things are different with me and Dustin now,” Will accuses.

“It’s not about that!” Lucas yells. “It’s about you doing your own thing and not involving the rest of us when we should be sticking together!”

“You’ve been doing that since we were thirteen,” Will yells back.

Max looks up from where she’s been studying her empty cup very intensely, tense and prepared to get herself involved in this fight, but Lucas is already saying something about that not being the same.

It’s only when Robin lets herself in the door with a tote bag full of bagels slung over her shoulder that they even pause.

“Hey, dinguses,” she says, slamming the bag on the table. “I heard you yelling about the you-know-where halfway down the stairs. Way to be subtle.”

“Thanks for bringing breakfast,” Nancy says, expression somehow unchanged, like the last ten minutes haven’t been excruciating.

“I’ll go get plates.” Jonathan leaves the room faster than Billy thought was humanly possible. Billy follows him to get the cream cheese out of the fridge and also to not have to be there anymore.

“Fucking hell,” he mutters to Jonathan, trying to encompass the entirety of his general feeling of _fuck no_.

“There’s more coffee in this apartment, right?” Jonathan says, lips twitching in what might be a smile.

“Only if you want them to actually kill each other.”

They eat breakfast in complete silence.

“Hey, guys?” Nancy asks eventually, wiping her mouth delicately with a napkin. “Haven’t Steve and Dustin been gone a really long time?”

-

**Chicago, December 2nd 1990**

With a groan, Billy drops the last box of books in the room that’s going to be their study just as soon as they get the furniture built up. He hadn’t really meant to collect so many of them, he’d started his degree fully intending to buy used copies and resell them as soon as he finished the class he needed them for, but then he’d started writing in the margins. Notes on symbolism and theming at first, so he’d remember what he’d thought of the reading in class; then, later, notes on what he thought were particularly beautiful turns of phrase; even later, what he thought were kind of clunky passages that he would word differently. By the time he’d looked back at his first semester’s worth of dog-eared, marked-up books, he’d known he wouldn’t be able to sell them to anyone and he hadn’t particularly wanted to.

“All set?” Steve calls from the kitchen.

“Yeah,” Billy says. “All the boxes are in the right rooms. We can start unpacking now.”

“What? No! Hold on,” Steve yells. “Come here!” There’s a popping noise, and then he swears.

Billy rounds the corner to the kitchen, where Steve’s pouring sparkling wine into water glasses over the sink. He straightens up and smiles brightly at Billy. “Happy move-in day,” he says brightly, thrusting a glass at Billy.

Billy wipes his dusty hands down the side of his pants. “Steve, we’ve been living together for four years,” he says.

“And this is the first apartment we’ve shared that wasn’t a shithole.”

“I liked our first apartment,” Billy says.

“You do remember the building being condemned?” Steve asks.

Billy takes the glass. They clink together. Billy takes a sip and winces.

“Yeah,” Steve agrees. “It cost less than two dollars, though.”

“I think we should start in the bedroom,” Billy says. “So we can at least crash in a real bed tonight.”

“No, wait,” Steve says. “We’re not done here.”

“Why not? We came, we toasted…”

Steve makes an impatient noise. “We need to commemorate the occasion.”

“Okay,” Billy says, and takes another sip of his wine. It hasn’t gotten better.

Steve does the same, and then sighs deeply. “I just wanted it to be special, you know? It’s our first place after college. We could stay here for years. It’s a _nice_ place.”

“It’s a huge place.”

“Four rooms, Billy,” Steve says. “Not the world.”

“Four rooms and a kitchen and a bathroom is six rooms in my book.”

“Well, I’ll call the real estate industry and let them know their definition sucks.”

Billy sets the class down on the counter. “What’s this really about, Steve?”

Steve hunches his shoulders. “When I told my dad I was going to Chicago to be a police officer, he said I wouldn’t even get a degree, much less a job. Said I’d be begging for help within a year. This,” he gestures to the kitchen, probably to the whole apartment, “it feels like I finally proved him wrong. I know it’s dumb—”

“It’s not dumb,” Billy interrupts. “I’m proud of you.”

“I—” Steve stops dead, his cheeks flushing.

“I mean it,” Billy says, but the words don’t really feel like enough, so he takes Steve’s glass away from him and boxes him in against the counter. “Really,” he whispers against Steve’s ear, and kisses him.

Steve kisses back hotly, his hands sliding up the back of Billy’s shirt. 

Billy debates apologizing for not getting what the big deal was about the apartment, but then Steve nips at his lower lip, so he decides Steve’s probably not that angry about it.

“Lemme show you,” he murmurs against Steve’s lips, and sinks to his knees. 

The ridges between the tiles on the floor dig into his skin even through the thick material of his jeans. It’s secondary to the way Steve’s fingers fumble the buckle of his belt, already eager, already plumping up in his boxer shorts. He rubs his cheek against the bulge of Steve’s dick, mouths at it through the fabric, looks up at Steve.

Steve’s looking right back. He looks hungry.

When Billy takes the head of his cock into his mouth, Steve strokes through Billy’s hair.

“You’re so good at that,” he praises.

Trapped in his jeans, Billy’s dick pulses.

It’s no fair that Steve can get him like that, even after five years.

He sets his mind to it, then, rocking his mouth forward and back rhythmically, fucking it down on Steve’s cock, clutching at Steve’s ass to keep himself grounded. Lets himself get a little lost in it, sensation winding down to the click of his throat when he gets too greedy and tries to take more than he can handle, to the heaviness of Steve’s hand resting on his head, fingers knotted in Billy’s hair.

Steve’s other hand grips at the counter. Something behind him is shifting, cardboard scraping over countertop, but Billy doesn’t care, can’t care, not with Steve murmuring praise above his head between deep sighs, not when he can taste the salt-bitter of Steve’s precome, not when he’s doing so _well_.

Steve comes with a low, drawn-out noise. His grip on Billy’s hair loosens; Billy pulls back to draw in air, the last pulse of Steve’s come landing sticky-hot at the corner of his mouth. He licks it off.

Sinking down to kneel across from Billy, Steve uses the hand on his head to tilt it so he can kiss Billy again, deep and slow and drugging the last of Billy’s senses.

“Please,” he whines. 

“I got you, baby,” Steve croons. “You did so well, bet you’re all worked up now.”

Noises shake out of Billy’s throat, assent and desperation, and then Steve’s got his pants undone, rubs him through the cotton of his boxers.

Billy _keens_.

He surges forward, kisses Steve again, sloppy, as Steve rubs slow and gentle over the bulge of Billy’s dick.

“You know what?” Steve whispers in his ear. “I’m so proud of you, too.”

Billy bites into Steve’s shoulder so he doesn’t scream when he comes, staining his boxer shorts, pulsing hot against Steve’s hand through the thin barrier.

He slumps to the side when it’s over, knees sore from being pressed into the floor for so long. His shoulder presses hard against the cabinets and the box of silverware that must have shifted before falls to the ground.

Steve startles and hits his head on the knob of the top drawer.

Neither of them can stop laughing until they’re rudely interrupted by the phone ringing.

Billy hoists himself up. “Hargrove,” he says into the receiver.

“Hi,” an unfamiliar female voice on the other end says. “Is this Steve Harrington’s number? It’s Liz.”

“Just a sec.” Billy hands the phone to Steve. _Work_ , he mouths.

Steve takes the phone. “Hi, this is Steve Harrington.”

He smiles at Billy briefly, and then turns to pick up the fallen box. “Yeah, that was a friend. Helped me move in. You got the right number.” He pauses. “Uh-huh. Yeah. No, I’ll be in tomorrow.”

When the silverware is back where it belongs and the phone is back on the hook, Steve asks, “So, bedroom first?”

“Yeah,” Billy says. “Bedroom first.”

-

**Chicago, July 7th 1994**

At noon, when it still seems like Steve and Dustin might have gotten held up somewhere and would be back anytime, Lucas and Max take the L out to East Garfield Park, her with her skateboard jammed under her arm, him with Dustin’s polaroid camera. 

At two thirty, when the phone has remained stubbornly silent for hours, Will calls Steve’s office pretending to be a suspect in a case Steve had mentioned who had reconsidered and wanted to make a statement.

At two thirty-two, Will hangs up the phone and turns to Billy. “She said Steve called in sick.”

Billy swallows heavily.

At four, they find the Camaro pulled into an alley three blocks away from the apartment. Neither Steve nor Dustin is inside. 

At four thirty, they check Will and Dustin’s apartment again, just to be sure. Will swears it’s the same as it was that morning. Dustin’s car is untouched in its parking space. With all their options exhausted, they return to the apartment to wait for news.

Will’s been sitting still and staring out the window for at least ten minutes before he asks, “Do you think they’re…there?” 

It’s the first time in all this, Billy realizes, that Will has mentioned it himself, the ever-present possibility of the other side.

“I don’t know,” Billy says.

“How do you do it?” Will asks.

“Do what?” 

“How do you _stand_ not being able to _do_ something? You’ve been together for nine years.”

Billy’s throat is too dry to swallow. 

When Will was sixteen, Billy had told him they could talk about anything. He’d meant the experience – being gay in small-town Indiana, surviving the indignity of going unacknowledged and unwanted and going on to find some place else in the world – some person in the world – where that pain could be laid to rest. Billy had been all of twenty years old then. 

He hadn’t known anything.

“There’s ways,” he says. “A friend or a roommate can call the police just as much as a husband can if someone goes missing. Steve’s insurance company doesn’t care if it’s a family member they call or someone else. So they call me, if something happens.”

“The nurses still might not let you into the hospital room if he’d been in an accident,” Will says. “The police wouldn’t call me if Dustin had been kidnapped. They wouldn’t even call me if his body turned up in Lake fucking Michigan.”

Billy draws in a deep breath and tries not to shudder.

“I’m so sick of it,” Will says. “Not being seen.”

“It’s better for us now than it ever has been before,” Billy says. The words sound hollow before he even says them.

“What use is that?” Will asks, tears in his eyes. “What fucking purpose does that serve me _now_? Better isn’t good!”

Robin’s been sitting on the couch, keeping her distance, trying to respect their privacy inasmuch as she can when she’s stationed next to the phone just in case someone calls, comes up from behind Will and hugs him tight.

“It sucks,” she says. “You’re right. It’s not fair and it’s bullshit and I’m so sorry.”

At six, Max and Lucas come back with a stack of polaroids of every white man in a suit Lucas could catch while pretending to be taking a shot of Max doing a kickflip.

For lack of other ideas, they sort the pictures into piles, sitting around the table in the living room: Dads with their kids walking around near the park, sad men eating lunch alone and really creepy-looking guys.

Nancy and Jonathan get back from the public library by eight. They have a list of twenty former employees of Hawkins National Lab they pulled from every surviving record they could get whose names they found in the phonebooks of Chicago or the surrounding areas.

“It’s not an exact science,” Nancy warns. “There are four Malcolm Prescotts living in the area. We’ll start calling them all tomorrow, but we really need Steve’s documents.” Usually, Billy thinks of the tiny, encroaching crow’s feet around her eyes as laugh lines. Today, they just seem like she’s aging along with the rest of them.

“I’ll get them in the morning,” Billy says. “I know enough about his office to find them.”

Nancy nods briskly and starts handing out jobs for the rest: Will and Jonathan to pose as tourists taking artsy photos of empty buildings in East Garfield Park; Robin and Max to call every number she found today looking for Hawkins Lab employees. She’s running through tips on how to sound convincing and Max is assuring her that she’s worked in customer service since she started her bachelor’s degree and needs no fucking help.

Billy goes to order food while they hammer out a script, what delicately probing questions they can ask while pretending to be insurance agents looking for a lawsuit.

It’s been less than twelve hours since he last saw Steve. They’ve gone longer than that apart before, conferences and out-of-town workshops that left Billy sleeping alone in crisp hotel sheets, calling home whenever he could. Steve’s had stakeouts that last all night, when he hasn’t come home for a full thirty-six hours.

He always called.

Billy’s not hungry, but he skipped lunch and he can already tell he won’t be getting much by way of sleep, so pizza it is. He’ll be able to swallow it down and get some energy, even if he won’t taste anything.

He zones out on the couch while Lucas and Robin work out a schedule for babysitting the phone and calling up the answering machine at Will and Dustin’s apartment, just in case someone calls there, while Nancy makes everyone repeat back to her what they’ll be doing, while they all settle into tense, anxious waiting.

When the pizza comes, he freezes. 

It’s thirty-nine ninety-five, the delivery driver says, and Billy knows Steve always tips at least fifteen percent on deliveries and twenty in restaurants, because he talks a lot about how his dad used to shortchange waiters, but his mind is blank as to how he can get to fifteen percent. Steve usually just tells him what to pay. He pulls two twenties out of his wallet and then pauses, trying to figure out if a five or a ten is the right bill to add. He stutters. He stops, shaking.

Lucas gives the delivery driver a bunch of small bills Billy doesn’t even really see.

“Is he okay?” The guy asks. 

“Yeah, thanks,” Lucas says and takes the box of pizzas. He shuts the door and pulls Billy back to the living room by his elbow.

“ _Dude_ ,” Lucas says to him when Billy’s sunk back onto the couch.

“Sorry,” Billy mutters. “I just. Steve—“

“Steve always does the tipping,” Lucas says. “I know. Hey, it’ll be okay, man. We’ll get him back.” He clasps Billy’s shoulder hard. “Come on, you gotta eat something.” He jerks his head at Will.

Will gets the plates out of the cupboard in record time, and between the two of them, they get Billy a slice of pepperoni and a slice of Hawaiian before Billy can even tell them that’s what he wants. 

They haven’t spoken about what they said to each other this morning.

Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore.

It’s only when everyone else has gotten their pizza and settled around the living room that Jonathan finally deigns to speak, for the first time since he and Nancy got back.

“Hey, Will?” He says. “I, uh, I called Mom.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did you know that same-sex civil partnerships were only legalized in 2011 in Illinois? I didn't, until I wrote this fic.
> 
> Chapter title is from "Water" by Ra Ra Riot.
> 
> Let me know what you think!


	9. my own two feet (don’t lie awake for me)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “We’ll get him back,” Joyce says, and prays the universe won’t make her a liar this time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Swearing, drinking

**Chicago, July 7th 1994**

Will stops dead in the threshold between the living room and the bedroom. 

He’s holding up well, so far. He’d hugged her, when she got to Billy’s apartment after driving like a crazy person for two and a half hours to get there. He’d even asked where Hopper was, and while Joyce doesn’t like her kids thinking she can’t be anywhere without him anymore just because she gave in and started dating him, it’s still nice that Will cares. But Hopper was in his own car, driving to Boston and his own daughter the instant Jonathan called to tell them what had happened, just as soon as Joyce was in hers, headed to her kids.

Joyce can still tell it’s been rough on them all. Jonathan had stayed back with Nancy and Robin to keep Billy company and help him clean up when the rest of them had left to return to their own apartments, Billy silent and shaky like Joyce had never seen him. Will had led her here, to the apartment he only just moved into, with boxes piled up in the corners, and started getting out bedding for her immediately. He’s been like a car on cruise control ever since she got here, staring blankly ahead and going through the motions.

Until now.

“What is it?” Joyce asks from where she’s unfolding the blanket Will gave her. It’s one of her old blankets, and there’s a little joy in that, that it moved with her son from Hawkins to Los Angeles to Chicago.

“His socks,” Will says. He’s quiet – he’s almost always quiet, her son. Usually, that’s something Joyce loves about him.

She comes up to stand behind him, but he’s so tall she can’t really see over his shoulder.

“Dustin forgot his socks this morning,” he says.

Joyce waits a moment. It seems like there should be more to that, and sure enough—

“His feet get really cold.” Will says. “Even in California, he was always—he always wore socks to bed. And he forgot them today.”

“Oh, honey,” Joyce says, feeling a part of her heart break open.

When Will turns to face her, it seems like all of his has shattered to pieces. “The last thing I said to him was so—angry,” he says, already muffled against her hair as she holds him close. “And now he’s gone, he might be alone, he might be in the Upside Down and his feet will be cold.”

“Steve wouldn’t leave him alone,” Joyce tells him, hoping she sounds more sure than she is. She remembers what that place was like, the dark, the stillness, the emptiness and the ashes. Lots of things can happen in a place like that.

“ _I_ shouldn’t have left him alone,” Will says. “I was so angry, and it was so _stupid_ of me.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?” Joyce asks. 

Will blinks down at her, tears bright in his eyes. “That wouldn’t be weird?”

“Oh, please!” She says, swatting at his shoulder. “You would not believe the things I’ve had to talk to Jonathan about. Or the things I’ve had to talk to _Nancy_ about. This’ll be great.”

Will sniffs a bit, pulling himself together even though Joyce wants to tell him he doesn’t need to, he’s fine just how he is. “Jonathan talks to you about…this stuff?”

“He used to,” Joyce says, pulling Will over to the couch. “Come on, sit, sit. When he was your age. Or younger, I guess. You never really seemed to need that, but your brother…” She leans in close, acts like it’s a big secret. “Your brother does not understand women very well.”

It pulls a weak smile from Will, even now, the most obvious statement in the world. He’s hunched forward, arms wrapped around himself, making himself so much smaller than he is. She hasn’t seen him act like that in years.

“Dustin didn’t tell me he and Steve were looking into the Hawkins National Lab guys,” Will says. “He said the time was wrong, because we were moving and he didn’t want to bug me, but…” He stops for a second, looks over at her. “He was trying to protect me, and I hate that. And he knows I hate that.”

There’s something in the way he says it that reminds Joyce of all the times she and Hop would change the subject when Will entered the room, back in ’85, when the dregs of the Hawkins National Lab and the Russians were slipping through the cracks. It reminds her of how long Will campaigned to be allowed to bike to school alone, how that turned into campaigns for later curfews, for his driver’s license, for her permission to drive to Bloomington on the weekends, and how often he’d ended those discussions by asking her permission to just be a normal kid. It reminds her most of how he’d stood in front of her, raised his voice for the first time in four years and told her he wanted to go to California because he didn’t want to stay trapped in the shadow of what had happened to him forever. 

“It can be really hard,” she says. “When you love someone. To not protect them.”

“I know that’s why he did it,” Will says. “I know. I just…I don’t want him to see me as less than.”

“Sweetie, I’ve seen how that boy looks at you,” Joyce says. “I don’t think he could see you as less than _anything_.”

Will’s smile is watery. “I always kind of thought you, um, didn’t really take it seriously, that I’m with him.”

Will had told her and Jonathan, over Thanksgiving weekend in ’92, that he was dating Dustin. She’d tried hard to hide her initial reaction – instant disapproval that he was dating the boy he lived with. She hadn’t even seen them together until Christmas, and then she had barely been able to tell a difference, except that Will was smiling more. Over the course of the next year, she’d tabled her concerns about their living situation because Will had never seemed unhappy and because, the more she saw of them, the more she caught the way Dustin would look at her son when Will wasn’t looking back: like he couldn’t believe his luck. By this year, any concerns she might have had about Will moving across the country with Dustin _again_ had been thoroughly eclipsed by the postcard she got from Jonathan in April, announcing that he’d gotten married and she hadn’t been invited.

She’d never really asked Will much about it, she realizes. She’d stopped asking Will how Dustin was doing altogether, because it had seemed intrusive all of a sudden, even though she and Dustin used to chat on the phone for up to half an hour when Will wasn’t home.

It’s her fault that Will feels like this, now. 

“It’s so hard,” she says, getting choked up herself. “To remember that you boys are grown up now, and that you love other people than your mom, and that you have your own families. I guess I thought you’d stay my baby a little longer.”

“I’ll always love you, mom,” Will says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world and not the most precious.

“You love Dustin, too, though, don’t you, and I was too wrapped up in being your mom and protecting you to see it.”

“I don’t need protecting.”

“I know, baby,” she says, stroking through his hair. “Sometimes you gotta let me do it anyway.”

“I really love him.” He leans against her and rests his head against her shoulder even though he’s much too tall for that.

“We’ll get him back,” Joyce says, and prays the universe won’t make her a liar this time.

-

**Los Angeles, May 31st 1993**

“No, Dave, we do not make jello shots in this household,” Dustin says, exasperation heavy in his voice.

“Anymore!” Dave argues. “You don’t anymore, but you used to make the best ones.”

“And _why_ don’t we make them anymore?” Dustin asks in the tone of a very patient primary school teacher.

“Because ever since Will started sleeping with you, you’ve gotten really lame, Henderson,” Dave says.

Dustin closes his eyes as if praying for patience. 

“Hey!” Will says, pulled momentarily out of his conversation with a girl from Dustin’s improv class who’s wearing a giant, self-made Doctor Who scarf even though they’re indoors, in Los Angeles, in May. “You were my roommate first! You should think Dustin made me lame!”

Dave slings an arm around Dustin’s shoulders. “Naw,” he says. “Henderson’s my man!”

For a political science major at one of the most liberal colleges in the US, Dave’s kind of staunchly midwestern, which is probably why Will and Dustin both like him so much. 

“I won’t give you secret jello shots just because you’re complimenting me,” Dustin says warily.

“But you _have_ secret jello shots!” Dave pumps his fist in triumph.

Will and Dustin exchange a look. They had agreed to not take the jello shots out of the fridge until at least ten PM, not after the last time, when Dave and Kate had been so drunk they’d had to share the pull-out couch with one of Dustin’s computer science friends. It had been a very awkward morning after.

So far, things are looking better tonight. It’s always a little weird, when they have both of their college friends over at once, because Will’s friends with a weird mix of psych majors and performing arts majors from a random mix of the Claremont Colleges, the only common thread being that all of them got involved in Act Up at some point during their college years (even Dave). Dustin’s friends are all science majors. 

Usually, they stand in little clumps of three and four with likeminded people until everyone is really drunk, at which point it ceases to matter who’s a lesbian and who’s analyzing the effects of daylight savings on the circadian rhythm of the banana slug. Today, they’re mingling of their own accord.

Maybe it’s the end of senior year, Will muses.

Not for him, of course, and not for Dustin either. Dustin’s got another year and then he’ll have his Master’s in computer science. Will just picked a major late and has to tack on an extra semester to finish up his thesis. (“That’s not justified,” Dustin argues, when Will says it like that. “You worked fifteen hours a week for the entire time you were at college. Finishing on time would be _ridiculous_.”)

For a lot of their friends, though, this will be the last party of the year, before they go their separate ways to grad school or, even worse, to real jobs. Not all of them – some are sticking around the area for grad school, and some are in the same boat as Will. Some are even in the same boat as Dustin.

Kate comes over, sipping something from a solo cup that doesn’t smell like anything Will or Dustin bought for this occasion. “Boys!” She says.

Maybe Will underestimated how drunk everyone at this party is.

“Have I told you how happy I am you’re together?” She asks.

“Literally every week for a year, Kate,” Will says.

“It’s been a year! I’m so happy for you guys.” She squeals. “Will, he was so in love with you for so long, it was _tragic_.”

“Okay, time for jello shots,” Dustin says. He makes a beeline for the fridge, and he probably thinks people won’t see how embarrassed he is, but he’s very wrong. It’s cute.

Maybe Will underestimated how drunk _he_ is.

“Seriously,” Kate whispers. “He’s so good for you, look how happy you are.”

“Yeah,” Will whispers back. “I’m really happy.”

Alone in their bedroom at five in the morning, when everyone (except Dave, who’s crashing on the couch again) is gone, he repeats it just for Dustin.

“Me too,” Dustin says. “Also drunk. I’m so drunk. I need to—lemme—” He shifts around until half his leg is dangling off the side of the bed. “There. Less dizzy. I’m happy, too.”

Will gives into his drunk impulse to rub his nose into the top of Dustin’s head. It’s a sober impulse, too, really, but he only gives into it drunk. “I don’t wanna go to Hawkins,” he says.

“Ugh, that’s a month away.”

“I know,” Will whines, “I just. I wish everyone there were as cool about us as people here are.”

Dustin runs a hand up Will’s back. “They’ll get used to it,” he says. “It’s only been a year, and they don’t see us that much.”

“I _guess_.”

“Aw, come on, honey,” Dustin says, pressing poorly aimed kisses to whatever bit of Will’s face he can reach. “My mom likes us together.”

“Your mom is _so nice_. My mom is all…weird.” Will walks his fingers up and down the side of Dustin closest to him.

“Hey, that tickles. I’ll get her to like me. ‘M like…mushrooms, or whatever the thing is that gets better with age.”

“That’s wine. Mushrooms just grow on you.”

“Eh.” Dustin waves a hand around, accidentally smacking Will in the shoulder. “Same difference. Sleep now?”

“Love you.”

“Love you too, honey.”

“Let’s stop making jello shots, yeah?”

“No more jello shots.”

-

**Chicago, July 8th 1994**

Will had been asleep on the couch when Jonathan came in last night, dark circles under his eyes. “Nance is staying with the others,” he had whispered. “But I wanted to be here.”

Joyce had nodded, finger pressed to her lips. Will had been exhausted by the time they’d finished their heart-to-heart and he’d needed the rest. Jonathan had gone into the bedroom. He’d come back with the blankets and pillows from the bed, and he and Joyce had laid side by side on the floor, listening to Will breathe.

At some point after three, Joyce must have fallen asleep after all. She wakes up much too early and her back is killing her. She tries to scream quietly when she gets up. Will’s still asleep.

Jonathan’s in the kitchen. He’s made coffee, bless him. Sometimes, Joyce isn’t sure she did right by her kids. Other times, they make her coffee.

“What’s that?” She whispers, taking the mug he offers her and gesturing towards the piece of paper on the kitchen table.

He shrugs. “It was on the fridge.”

Joyce turns the paper around so she can read it.

_1\. split personality – thinks he’s his own mom  
2\. runs a sex trafficking ring out of the pink room  
3\. the dolls have real eyes  
4\. secret portal to 1943 in the basement  
5\. ate his own twin in the womb  
6\. heroin smuggler_

Jonathan shrugs helplessly again. “How’s he doing?” He asks

Joyce sighs. “Not great,” she says. “He’s blaming himself that Dustin went missing.”

There’s a crease between Jonathan’s eyebrows that Joyce just knows is close to being a frown line. She watched it show up over the course of Jonathan’s adolescence. She had hoped leaving Hawkins would make it vanish. 

His ring clinks against the coffee cup when he picks it up to take a sip.

“Come on, show me,” she says, holding out her hands.

Jonathan sighs, as if he’s deeply put-upon by having to show his mom his wedding ring.

It’s gold.

“Nice,” Joyce says.

“We saved up,” he admits. “Nancy’s grandma had arthritis in all her fingers except the one with the gold wedding ring. Seemed lucky.”

“That’s nice.”

“Yeah.”

“So,” she says before she can stop herself. “You were planning this for a while.”

Jonathan looks away. “Sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry. I just want to understand.”

“We didn’t want it to be a big deal,” Jonathan says, like that explains anything. “It’s—we didn’t want to make anyone think we were going to. You know.”

Joyce gives him her best wide-eyed look. “What do I know?”

“Nancy doesn’t want kids,” Jonathan says. “I don’t really, either. We didn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up.”

“Well, if that’s all,” Joyce says, clutching at her heart in fake relief. “I guess I’ll have to pin all my grandkid hopes on Dustin. He seems like the type.”

Jonathan’s startled into a laugh. 

Will comes into the kitchen not long after, groggy and in yesterday’s clothes. “Mom,” he says through a yawn, “tell me you didn’t sleep on the floor.”

“Okay,” she says, “I won’t tell you.”

Will shakes his head and makes for the coffeepot. 

“Hey, Will?” Jonathan asks. “Are you going to explain this very normal list on your fridge to us?”

Will drains about half his mug black, in one go, before he looks at the sheet of paper. “Dustin and me always stop at that motel in Nebraska,” he says. “I’ve told you about it. With the dolls? We were trying to figure out why the receptionist was so creepy.”

Jonathan glances back over the list. “I can’t decide which is the most likely,” he says drily.

“We can’t all be fancy investigative journalists,” Will says. 

“I just take pictures.” Jonathan holds his hands up in self-defense. 

Will shakes his head again, clearly unwilling to argue the point. “I have some Wonder Bread and strawberry jam in the fridge, but that’s it if you guys want breakfast.”

“Let’s just pick something up on our way to Billy’s,” Joyce says.

“Alright,” Will says. “Yeah. I guess we should go. I didn’t miss any calls or anything, did I?”

Joyce pats his arm helplessly. “Sorry, sweetie. Nothing new yet. It hasn’t even been a full day, though. He’s going to be fine.”

Will swallows heavily. “Yeah. We should, we should get going.”

She stops him with the same hand on his arm. “Will,” she says. “Do you think we should call Claudia?”

Will sits down heavily on one of the kitchen chairs. “I didn’t even think of that,” he admits.

“Do you have her number?”

“Yeah, of course,” Will says. “I just—she worries about him. A lot.”

“I know,” Joyce says, remembering a hundred PTA meetings she wishes she could forget.

“She should know,” Will decides. “If we don’t hear anything by tonight, I’ll call her.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is from "Gloria" by the Lumineers
> 
> This is a very family-hefty chapter. Next time: Billy commits a minor felony and Lucas has a breakthrough.


	10. weak kneed, guaranteed (make my heart bleed)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Billy will deal with the fallout later.
> 
> (That’s an old lie, a lie he used to tell himself every day when he lived under Neil Hargrove’s roof.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for: theft, referenced physical abuse of a minor, discussion of the MK Ultra program

**Chicago, July 8th 1994**

At eight in the morning, still with no word from anyone, Billy goes to Steve’s office. Police precincts give him the heebie-jeebies, even though it’s been years since he stood in one and signed his name under a statement against his father. But there are more important things than Billy’s hang-ups, more important things even than their privacy, which Billy guards fiercely under normal circumstances.

He called his office this morning and asked for the week off. He hasn’t done that since he started working there straight out of college, not when he sprained his wrist, making his job as an editor pretty difficult, not when he caught a cold so severe he had to wear two sweaters and carry an extra pack of tissues with him everywhere for two full weeks. He didn’t even have it in him to lie about it. He’d told his boss it was a family emergency, and, when pressed by Derrick’s concerned questions, he’d said it had to do with his partner and found himself completely unable to finish the sentence. It had been convincing enough for Derrick to give him the week and offer more if he needed it.

Billy will deal with the fallout later.

(That’s an old lie, a lie he used to tell himself every day when he lived under Neil Hargrove’s roof.)

(Billy’s not sure he ever dealt with the fallout or if he just let himself fall apart in Steve’s arms when the memories were too much.)

(The fallout of even just the thought of never seeing Steve again – or, worse, never seeing Steve alive again – makes Billy’s stomach clench tight. The thought of Steve having scars like Billy’s own, etched into his skin and his mind, leaves a bitter taste in Billy’s mouth.)

He takes a deep breath as he walks through the glass doors of the second floor, past the uniform officers and into the area where Steve’s colleagues are chatting to each other, scent of the shitty coffee Steve always complains about thick in the air.

“Excuse me,” he says to a petite brunette woman he can sort of place as Liz, because she sometimes drives by their apartment to pick Steve up in the morning.

She turns and smiles at him. “How can I help you?” 

“I’m Billy,” he says. “I live with Steve. Harrington?” He plasters his most charming smile across his face, tries to keep it sincere.

“Oh,” she says. “Is he okay? He never calls in sick.”

Billy swallows thickly. “Yeah,” he says. “Uh, no, Steve’s not doing great. Stomach flu, y’know? Head’s been down the toilet all night. I said I’d come by and pick up his, uh, his pager? He left it in his desk last week and his mom gets worried when he doesn’t answer her.”

Liz winces in sympathy. “Oh no,” she says. “I’ll show you to his desk. He must be feeling really awful if he can’t even call in himself.”

Billy means to nod, tries to shrug, and ends up doing a weird mix of both. 

“You’re sure he’s not contagious?” She asks him, eyes narrowed.

“Yeah,” Billy says. “No, I’m fine.”

“Mhm. Well, Steve’s desk is right over there, second from the elevator. What did you say your name was again?”

“Billy,” Billy says, and wonders if he should have come up with an alias.

She nods slowly. “Billy. Right.”

“Is there a problem?”

There’s sweat prickling down the back of his neck. He used to be so good at getting away with shit. He wonders when he stopped being cool.

Liz smiles brightly. “No,” she says. “I guess I just always assumed Steve lived with a Billie-with-an-i-e, y’know?”

Heat surges to Billy’s face. “Oh,” he says. “Uh, well. Yeah, I can see that that’s confusing.”

“No, it’s my mistake,” she says, waving him off. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“You too,” he tells her, and then makes his escape towards Steve’s desk. He makes sure her back is turned as he rifles through the drawers. Steve’s pretty predictable about where he hides shit – Billy can’t look at the top shelf of his closet or the bottom drawer of his dresser in the weeks before Christmas or his birthday – and sure enough, at the back of the bottom drawer, he finds two manila folders separated out from the rest of Steve’s open cases. He stuffs them under his shirt, tucks it in really quick and zips his leather jacket up over it again, just in time for Liz to catch his eye with a quizzical smile. Billy holds up the pager he brought with him from home as a decoy with a weak grin, and leaves the precinct as fast as he can.

He’s glad he drove. His knees are weak when he sits down in the driver’s seat, and it takes him a moment to be able to even start the car. Walking would have been hell.

God, how did he used to do this shit?

He remembers being seventeen, scaling the wall of the Harrington’s house, heart in his throat, unsure of his welcome and unsure if it would somehow make its way back to his dad that he had been there. He remembers drinking and driving like an asshole. He remembers doing kegstands for a full thirty seconds, when now, chugging a single beer gives him heartburn from the carbonation. He remembers paying a sketchy guy fifty dollars for his first tattoo, no receipt, no plastic wrap, no disinfectant.

Here he is, twenty-six and having heart palpitations over stuffing two folders up his shirt.

He drives home carefully, paying extra attention to speed limits and stop signs. He walks up the stairs, paper sliding uncomfortably around under his shirt, sticking to his skin, slipping ever downwards and held only in place by his jacket and sheer will.

He locks and bolts the door before he takes the folders out from under his shirt.

He remembers something Hopper mentioned two Thanksgivings ago and unscrews every lightbulb in the apartment before he looks at what’s inside.

He unplugs the phone, too, for good measure.

Then, he sits down at the kitchen table and opens the first folder.

“Fuck,” he says to his silent, dark apartment.

-

**Hawkins, May 31st 1989**

“Come on,” Steve hisses to him. “At least try to look like you’re not physically in pain.”

Billy wants to tell him that he is in pain, because the public schools in Indiana apparently haven’t shelled out for new folding chairs since the 1950s and his ass is already falling asleep on the lawn outside the school, but he’s stopped by the beginning of the valedictorian’s speech.

He catches sight of Dustin, who only made salutatorian, making a face.

It’s a little overcast, not as brightly beautiful as it had been when Billy finally graduated. Although that may just be his memory of the day, how Steve had been waiting for him out front with the car already packed up to get the fuck out of Hawkins the second Billy had his diploma, how they’d driven west in the bright June sunlight to spend two weeks getting fucked up on the beach before returning to Chicago.

Dustin would have held a better speech, Billy decides about three minutes in. It would have been weird and probably contained some tangents about radio signals or rare amphibians. The speech they get is fine, but it’s boring and Billy has zoned out long before the girl holding it starts quoting that Robert Frost poem everyone uses for coming of age moments. 

He can see the back of Susan’s head, four rows in front of them and slightly to the left. 

He hasn’t spoken to her since he had called her from the police station in Chicago and told her that her husband was in custody for aggravated assault.

For a moment, he can feel the phantom ache of the cuts all down his thigh, where Neil had smashed a glass into him when he’d dared to fight back, after watching Steve nearly get choked to death for having the temerity to be queer with Billy.

He’d thought, before that, that he would be able to live with what Neil had done to him, what Neil had been like, and that it would fade harmlessly into memory.

Neil had decided that driving to a city three hours away was worth it to get his favorite punching bag back.

Calling the police wouldn’t have been Billy’s first choice, but he hadn’t had many left over. He could only choose whether or not to press charges.

Bail had been pretty hefty – Neil had previous charges, back in California – and Susan had been anything but pleased to have to drive all the way up to Chicago to pay it. 

She didn’t ask what Neil had done.

She never asked.

Not when Billy was still living in her house and Neil would shut the door on her to beat some sense into his son. Not when Billy was laid out in a hospital bed and her daughter couldn’t tell her why. Not when Billy lived on the other side of town for his entire senior year of high school because he didn’t dare come back to his father’s house.

When Billy had to drag Susan out of bed in the middle of the night because her husband was in jail in Chicago, Max was the one who asked, loudly and angrily, first on the phone and then in person, refusing to be cowed, refusing to be dissuaded, safe in the belief that Neil didn’t hit girls.

Billy had thought that it was him who made Neil aggressive, that it was things he had done that brought out Neil’s worst tempers, that Max would be safe, but it turned out that the temper was Neil’s problem and not his, and it turned out that no one was safe.

When Max called them, just after, crying and terrified, hiding at Lucas’s house, she had said that her mom would have to choose between Neil and her, and that Max wouldn’t keep living in the same house as him.

Susan still hasn’t forgiven either of them for forcing her into the choice.

Will is the first of the kids to get his diploma. He’s barely finished shaking the principal’s hand when the sheer size of the cheer for him makes him flinch. It’s not just that Joyce is clapping and stamping her feet, or that Hopper’s right there with her, as well as Karen Wheeler and the other PTA moms, it’s that Dustin’s hooting and hollering, setting off all other kids. The poor boy is bright red by the time he escapes the stage, but he deserves it.

It makes Billy smile for the first time since they’ve gotten here.

Max bounds over to him, smiling as bright as nuclear fucking waste, after it’s all over. She’s even more of a scarecrow than usual in her cap and gown, but at least the school colors match her hair. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she says, launching herself at Billy.

“Yeah, squirt,” he says. “Me too.”

He silently dares Steve to comment, glaring at him over the top of her head. 

Steve hides his laugh, badly.

He’s swarmed himself moments later by a group of teens all talking between themselves, loudly, asking for Steve’s opinions and advice on college. Max shakes her head, muttering “Nerds,” under her breath like she’s any fucking better.

“Maxine,” Susan calls.

She won’t come nearer Billy than six feet. 

Max gives Billy a look that he can’t quiet read. Desperation, maybe. She goes over to her mom.

“I’m headed home,” Susan says. “You’ll call me if you’ll be late?”

“Yeah,” Max says. “Thanks for coming.”

“Of course.”

Max pulls a face as she leaves.

“That bad, huh?” Billy asks. “I’m sorry.”

“What are you sorry for?”

“If it weren’t for me, she’d—”

“Shut up,” Max says. “You’re not allowed to finish that sentence. She’s the one who ruined it.”

Billy thinks, briefly, of his own mom, and wonders if maybe it’s her fault after all that he hasn’t seen her in years.

“Alright,” Steve says, hands on his hips and already frazzled by the sheer level of noise. “Who wants to go out for graduation pizza?”

His flock cheers.

Billy tucks Max under his arm and goes out for graduation pizza.

"You okay?" Steve asks him under his breath while Lucas and Mike talk over each other about the relative merits of pepperoni.

"Always," Billy tells him.

Steve gives him a look.

"'M with you, aren't I?" Billy asks him, grinning charmingly.

Steve's mouth opens, and then shuts, a flush spreading up his neck.

"God, you guys are gross," Max complains. "Come on, more pizza."

-

**Chicago, July 8th 1994**

Lucas is the one who cracks it, two hours after they started poring over the second folder Billy stole from Steve’s office, the correct folder.

“This has nothing to do with Dustin’s Ph.D.,” he says eventually, staring down at the sparsely worded description of what, exactly, the office that doesn’t exist in East Garfield Park is doing. “He’s getting a degree in computer science. Why would Steve ask him about ‘experimentation on the effect of serotonin substitutes’?”

“I thought Dustin was working on artificial intelligence?” Nancy asks, pencil behind her ear, scanning the second of twelve eyewitness reports of shady dealings in the same area that may or may not have anything to do with the government.

Lucas looks up at her, brow furrowed. “Why do _you_ know that?”

“He’s dating my brother-in-law,” Nancy says. “We talk.”

Lucas grimaces like he had forgotten that. Billy definitely had. He allows himself a brief, spiraling moment of insanity to follow that thought to its natural conclusion – since Nancy and Jonathan are married, Mike and Will are basically related now – and then shakes his head to clear it of the confusion. 

“Wait a minute,” Lucas says, snapping his fingers. “Dustin did a biochem elective last year, said he wanted to understand real brains before he went around making fake ones, right?”

Billy shrugs helplessly. He zones out pretty much any time any of the kids starts in on the science stuff too hard. Nancy looks equally lost.

Lucas rolls his eyes. “Max?” He calls. “Max, get off the phone, come here for a minute.”

Max comes out of the kitchen, where she and Joyce have been calling every overlapping number between the list Nancy made yesterday and the list Steve had made, weeks ago. “What?” She asks, flat and irritated. Billy would be, too, if he had to pretend to be an insurance salesperson all morning.

“Dustin took biochemistry last year, didn’t he?” Lucas asks, either ignorant or uncaring of how pissed Max looks.

“Yeah,” Max says. “He didn’t stop complaining about how he’d thought it would be more relevant to his work all semester. I told him human neurochemistry was never going to have much application for artificial intelligence, but did he listen? It was all, _you’re doing environmental biology, how would you know_.”

“So Steve could have called him up to ask what might be a serotonin substitute?”

“Yeah.” Max comes over to peer at the page over Lucas’s shoulder. “That sounds about right. His research paper was definitely something about serotonin. I think it was comparing melatonin and serotonin?”

Nancy leans forward. “Is that a serotonin substitute?”

Max shakes her head. Her hair, come loose from its braid, slips into Lucas’s line of sight and he tucks it back behind her ear. “People say so sometimes,” she says, “But it’s not, really. People really want serotonin substitutes, but the closest we’ve ever really gotten is probably, like, acid.”

“Oh my god,” Nancy says. “That’s it.”

“Huh?” Max asks.

“Acid.” 

“What?” Lucas asks.

“Get Joyce in here,” Nancy says, flicking through her notebook. 

Joyce, who’s in the middle of telling someone, not very nicely, that insurance doesn’t actually cover losing your job for taking part in experiments on children, looks even angrier when Nancy asks her about El’s mom.

When she’s told them everything she knows, Lucas leans forward. “They aren’t opening a new gate. They’re trying to make a new El.”

“Then why send an FBI agent here to tell us someone was opening the gate and we were all suspects?” Billy asks, feeling increasingly like the last half hour has just been him pushing his square head into a round hole.

“To keep us from talking to each other?” Max suggests. “We took ages to call Nancy and Jonathan in.”

“To keep us from telling the police when Steve and Dustin went missing,” Joyce says grimly. “To remind us we owe the government silence.”

“But everyone knows about MK Ultra,” Lucas argues. “There were senate hearings and everything.”

“I never signed anything to keep quiet about MK Ultra,” Billy says. “I didn’t even know that was involved until ten minutes ago. I signed to keep quiet about being possessed by a giant mind control spider.”

Joyce looks thoughtful. “Hop and I never told you kids about El’s mom. We didn’t even tell El about it in too much detail. Steve wouldn’t have known. Why kidnap him?”

Nancy smiles. She looks, suddenly, sharp and vicious. “To stop him from uncovering all this. You said it yourselves. There’s absolutely nothing in the NDAs stopping us from going public.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is from "Medusa in Chains" by the Fratellis. 
> 
> This one features even more things I had to research! And therefor probably even more things I got wrong!


	11. ready to construct (lovestruck)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If it weren’t such a shit situation, it would be a really good day to take photos. Even as is, Jonathan gets side-tracked into taking shots of empty, boarded-up shop fronts in the incongruously bright sunshine instead of keeping on track. It’s harder than he thought, to catch pictures of guys in suits almost accidentally, without trying to keep them perfectly in frame and in focus.
> 
> Will’s probably doing better at it than him, wearing the Polaroid camera on a strap around his neck, in sunglasses and sandals like a real tourist. It can be really hard to remember that he’s twenty-two, now, and not fourteen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: references to poverty, the LA riots of '92, human experimentation, swearing

**Chicago, July 8th 1994**

If it weren’t such a shit situation, it would be a really good day to take photos. Even as is, Jonathan gets side-tracked into taking shots of empty, boarded-up shop fronts in the incongruously bright sunshine instead of keeping on track. It’s harder than he thought, to catch pictures of guys in suits almost accidentally, without trying to keep them perfectly in frame and in focus. 

Will’s probably doing better at it than him, wearing the Polaroid camera on a strap around his neck, in sunglasses and sandals like a real tourist. It can be really hard to remember that he’s twenty-two, now, and not fourteen.

Jonathan’s been watching him out the corner of his eye all day, not just because they need to stick together for their cover story to make any kind of sense, but also because he’s worried. If there is a portal to the other side anywhere around here, it’ll be him going through this time and not Will. 

He’s also never known Will to be as intense as he has been, the last two days. When Will was younger, when he was still Jonathan’s responsibility, Jonathan worried sometimes that Will was too nice for his own good. He just accepted whatever was thrown at him. When Lonnie told him he should care about baseball, he agreed. When Jonathan told him being normal was for dweebs, he agreed. When girls called him Zombie Boy and asked him to dance in the same breath, he agreed. Jonathan’s still pretty sure he actually likes the Clash, but he doesn’t dare ask this Will. This is the Will who had no shame in calling Lucas out in front of all of them, not even when the topic turned to the sex life Jonathan would have been happy to go on pretending he didn’t have, the Will who drinks coffee black when he always used to say it tasted like dirt, the Will who has his own apartment, the Will who—

The Will who’s joined a group of kids with colored chalk on the street.

He’s pushed his sunglasses up to rest on top of his head and he’s sketching out a shape Jonathan thinks might turn into a superhero with broad strokes, chatting to the kid with the bucket of chalk.

Jonathan circles the block twice, taking snapshots as he goes. He knows, for his pictures to be worth anything, he’ll have to get access to a darkroom somewhere in Chicago, and his hopes aren’t exactly high. Maybe he can use the basement in Billy’s apartment building. At this point, he’s just biding time until Will’s ready to go. He sits down on a bench near where Will’s almost done with an immaculately shaded Spiderman hanging upside down on his web, keeps taking pictures for lack of anything better to do. He gets a good one of a guy in a suit holding a girl about half his age by the elbow, but he’s pretty sure she’s old enough that it’s not actually a crime.

When he’s just about exhausted his film, Will waves him over.

“What do you think?” He asks, gesturing to his Spiderman. 

“It’s great,” Jonathan says. Will’s art has always been great.

Will grins as if nothing in the world is wrong. “Joey here said he lets anyone who can draw borrow his chalk.”

“Well, that’s me out,” Jonathan says.

“You don’t have to draw like Will does,” Joey says seriously. He looks all of about ten years old. “My chalk is for all kinds of artists.”

“Oh yeah?” Will asks. “What’s the coolest thing someone’s ever drawn with it?”

“Mm,” Joey hums, considering. He’s coloring in the shape of Superman, fist thrust out, cape flowing behind him. Will must have traced it for him. Jonathan wonders how long they’ve been here already. “There was a lady a few days ago. She was old, like you. All she drew were these crazy patterns.”

“Did she tell you her name?” The way Will asks it is almost casual. 

“Nah,” Joey says. “Can I have the yellow back?”

“Sure.”

Jonathan’s almost certain it’s time to go, that the conversation is over, but then Joey says, “Some guy with shiny shoes made her leave before she finished drawing. I finished the bits she couldn’t afterwards.”

“Sounds like he sucks,” Will says.

“Yeah,” Joey agrees. “I don’t know why he cared, he has, like, ten other girlfriends.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, he comes here all the time.”

“What’s he look like?” Jonathan asks, a bit too eager.

Joey squints up at him. “Older than you. And he has really shiny shoes. Why are you asking me so much?”

“I have a friend who likes to draw patterns like that,” Will lies easily. “We were trying to find her.”

Joey shrugs and goes back to his drawing. “I don’t know where she went,” he says. “I haven’t seen her since then.”

Will completes the finishing touches on his Spiderman. “Thanks for letting me use your chalk,” he says.

Cool as you like, Joey nods to them as they leave.

“Do you think that’s relevant?” Jonathan asks Will as they head to the station to catch the L back to Billy and Steve’s apartment.

“Most suspicious thing I’ve heard all day,” Will says.

Jonathan nods. “How’d you know to ask him?”

“I saw a bit of that girl’s drawing, that pattern, about half a block away. It looked really familiar. Besides, I like talking to kids, they notice a lot.”

Jonathan looks at him in bafflement.

Will rolls his eyes. “Jonathan, you do remember I moved here to get a degree in social work, right? I have talked to children before.”

-

**Los Angeles, February 16th 1994**

“Hi, honey, I’m home!” Dustin calls way too loudly into their tiny apartment. He used to say it ironically, before they were dating. The longer they’re together, the less Will can remember what that was like.

Will groans.

He’s lying on the couch with his eyes closed as has been for the last forty-five minutes.

“What’s up?” Dustin asks, perching on the armrest by Will’s feet.

“Shitty day at work,” Will says. 

“Wanna talk?”

Will shrugs. “One of my kids’ parents decided to pull him out of my class.”

“That sucks.” Dustin pats at his knee briefly. When Will doesn’t keep talking, he starts a slow massage of the ball of his foot.

“Last week, he drew his brother getting shot during the riots,” Will says eventually. Most of the kids he does art classes with use it as some sort of therapy, but it’s rare for them to be so literal about it – for them to trust Will enough to show him exactly what’s going on in their lives.

“Jesus,” Dustin says.

“Yeah.”

The community center he’s been working at since sophomore year is far enough into the city that they’d had to shut down entirely during the riots almost two years ago. At the time, Will had only taught art classes three days a week, but he’d already been incensed that the only safe space some kids had was being closed when they needed it most. 

Now he’s finished his degree, he’s a full-time staff member and he plays basketball and does homework and even the occasional home visit with the children and teenagers who come to the center. Art classes may be his specialty, but the whole package is his job, at least until he and Dustin figure out where they’re going for grad school in the summer. It’s the best kind of work, but Will finds that he takes it more personally than he did, before, when he sees the same kids five days a week and can’t change all of their lives at once.

“I’m sorry his parents did that,” Dustin says.

Will sighs deeply, at least in part because Dustin just pressed against a sensitive spot on his foot especially hard. “It’s okay,” he says. “It’s not like I’ll never see him again, he’s at the center every other day. I just can’t wait to get my stupid degree so people take me seriously when I tell them that art is good for kids.”

Dustin chuckles. “I feel like there will always be some people who won’t care how much more you know than them.”

“I know,” Will says. “But at least I’ll feel better about it.”

For a while, Dustin is suspiciously silent. When he stops caressing Will’s foot, Will looks over at him. “What’s wrong?”

“Are you sure?” Dustin asks. “About becoming a social worker? It just…sounds really rough a lot of the time.”

Will pokes at Dustin’s side with his foot. “Yeah, I’m sure,” he says. “Every job has rough days. I wanna feel like I’m making a difference.”

“Hey!” Dusin exclaims, catching his foot. Once he’s ensured he’s in no danger of further pokage, he says, “You will. Even if parents are dumb about it sometimes. I just don’t like the thought of you getting hurt.”

 _Too late,_ Will thinks, because he used to be just like a lot of his students, drawing out the things he couldn’t talk about to exorcise them from his mind. Bob Newby, superhero, had haunted Will until he finally put the image to paper. It wouldn’t be fair to Dustin to say it like that, though. It’s not what Dustin means. “I won’t get hurt,” is all he says.

Dustin rolls his eyes. “Yeah you will,” he says. “But you’re going to love it anyway because you want to change the world. I get it.” He tickles the arch of Will’s foot and finally succeeds at his original goal: making Will laugh until he has to kick Dustin into stopping.

They’re both red-faced and snickering when Dustin finally pulls the thick envelopes they both received from the University of Chicago out of his messenger bag. 

“So,” he says. “I think I have good news about where we’re going for grad school.”

-

**Chicago, July 8th 1994**

There’s a woman in a pantsuit Will doesn’t recognize sitting at the table in Steve and Billy’s living room when they get back.

She introduces herself as Steve’s colleague, and in between Nancy’s explanation about why she’s there, his mom’s explanation about what MK Ultra has to do with El, and Lucas’s explanation about what the lab goons were trying to recreate exactly, Will nearly forgets the pictures stacked on the table.

“Hey,” Robin tells him in an undertone, while he’s still processing the information he’s just been given. “You know what that means? They’re probably not…you know.”

They’re probably not in the Upside Down.

The wave of relief is so overwhelming Will nearly laughs out loud. He only stops himself because Steve’s policewoman friend is already looking at him suspiciously, and so far, no one has mentioned alternate dimensions in her presence.

“We can definitely file a missing person’s report for Steve and your other friend,” Liz says, after the group of people crowded around the table finally runs out of things to say. “But I don’t really see how I can go bust up an empty store.”

“I don’t think it’s empty,” Will says. He pulls the stack of Polaroids he took today out of the pouch he’s carrying the camera in. “Lucas, can you give me the pictures you took yesterday?”

He spreads them out on the table. “Look out for girls around our age,” he says. 

They find only two pictures that match that description, one of his and one of Lucas’s, young women under the arm of much older men. They had discussed, yesterday, whether to file the picture Lucas took as “men with their kids” or “really creepy guys”. 

It’s the same man on both photos, only the girl has changed.

Will thinks again of the pattern he saw, pink and black and green in crazy stripes, ugly if it weren’t so regular. There’s something hauntingly familiar about that pattern the girl had drawn. Will wonders if there’s some weird Upside Down code burned into his brain, and then immediately discards that thought as useless.

Liz squints at the pictures. “What are you saying?”

“They might not be using the store, but what about basement? Or backrooms or something? They must be doing the experiments somewhere. A kid told us that he’s seen this guy or a guy like him with ten different women. That’s what they did with El’s mom, too, right? Experimented on her?”

“Okay,” Liz says. “So, we bust an empty, locked store, which I would need a warrant for, hoping to find creepy drug-fueled experiments in the basement and rescue Steve and Dustin, and our proof is that this guy took two different girls on walks?”

Lucas and Will exchange a glance. Even after years, nearly a decade between them and the last time this was happening, Will knows they’re both thinking, _this is why we don’t involve grown-ups_.

“Steve is definitely missing,” Billy says. “Isn’t that enough?”

“I don’t know,” Liz says. “You guys are saying this might be a government program?”

“Steve’s research sure says it does.” Lucas pushes the files at her, but she waves him off. 

“So does the FBI agent who came here to scare the shit out of us,” Robin adds.

Liz looks between them all. “I’m a detective,” she points out. “If the government wants this hushed up, I have no chance.”

“We need pressure from the media,” Nancy interprets. “I could throw together an article on what we have now, but I don’t think it will be enough for my editor.”

Joyce looks over at Will, hesitant. “What about if we get an interview with Dustin’s worried mom?”

Will’s heart sinks.

“Adds human interest,” Jonathan points out, trying to stamp out his own conscience.

“It’s a start,” Nancy allows. “But we’d need more.”

Billy pushes the papers spread across the table aside to pull out a second folder, unopened. “I think I might have an idea about that,” he admits.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Only one more chapter and the epilogue to go!
> 
> Chapter title is from "Every Time I'm Ready to Hug" by Ra Ra Riot
> 
> also Joyce is wrong about who will want kids, Will will bring home so many children and Dustin will be like COOL WANT TO DO SCIENCE WITH ME?
> 
> also I wasn't alive when the LA riots happened I'm sorry I just feel strongly about how the context of where things are set matters


	12. six cars and a grizzly bear (down the river somewhere)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’m William Hargrove. I’m here about your son,” Billy says.
> 
> Grant – Billy can’t bring himself to call the man ‘Harrington’, not even in his head, not when the name ‘Harrington’ brings back the gold-tinged memories of sneaking into in Steve’s bed in high school, pretending he knew so much more than he did, wondering if Steve felt anything like he did – looks up sharply. “What’s he done?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: nonconsensual drug use, kidnapping, swearing, blackmail

**9 AM Chicago, July 9th 1994**

“You don’t look like my nine o’clock,” Grant Harrington says when Billy and Will walk through his office door. Billy suppresses a whole host of uncharitable answers, not least that he made an effort to look like he belongs here. He’s wearing Steve’s loosest pair of dress pants instead of his own jeans just for the occasion.

“I’m William Hargrove. I’m here about your son,” Billy says.

Grant – Billy can’t bring himself to call the man ‘Harrington’, not even in his head, not when the name ‘Harrington’ brings back the gold-tinged memories of sneaking into in Steve’s bed in high school, pretending he knew so much more than he did, wondering if Steve felt anything like he did – looks up sharply. “What’s he done?” 

For the first time in too many days, Billy is deeply thankful he’s not seventeen and reckless anymore. Seventeen-year-old Billy was a raw nerve. He’d have exploded. Twenty-six-year-old Billy slides into the seat opposite Grant’s desk. Will comes to stand beside him, silent like they agreed. Will’s only tall enough to be threatening as long as he doesn’t open his mouth. 

“What do you think?” He asks.

Grant sighs, going back to the papers he was reading when they walked in. “That boy was always getting himself in trouble. It was only a matter of time. You his partners?”

Billy, momentarily shocked silent, can’t stop Will from answering, “You mean with the police?”

Grant nods. “I can only apologize for him.”

“Uh, yeah,” Billy says, belated. “I’m his partner.”

It’s not a lie, after all.

“Well, what’s my son done?”

“Steve was looking into a few of the scientists from Hawkins National Laboratory.”

Grant’s mouth turns downwards. “Nasty business,” he says. “I thought that was all cleared up ten years ago.”

Billy allows himself to sprawl a little, draws on his memory of what it used to be like with Tommy, how they would spread their legs wide and lean heavily on furniture to seem tougher than they were. “Well, the news broke ten years ago, but not everyone faced consequences.”

“No?”

“Steve’s been looking into a few of the higher-ups. Seems they’re looking to recreate a few of their experiments here in Illinois.”

“Well, that’s what happens when government gets too big,” Grant says, apropos of nothing and showing off, in Billy’s opinion, a pretty poor knowledge of how the government works in general. “I’m not really seeing what this has to do with me.”

“Steve’s been missing for two days,” Billy says.

“What do you want me to do about it, Mr. Hargrove?”

Billy smiles sharply. “You’re a man with a lot of influence, Mr. Harrington. You own properties in half the major cities in the Midwest. Use your clout a little. Go on TV. Draw attention to the problem. Make them give your son back.”

Grant leans back in his ridiculously large, leather office chair. “That’s an interesting proposition. I can see how you would get there. Are you aware I haven’t seen my son in eight years?”

“Yes.”

“So why would I go risking my very lucrative career for an ungrateful brat?”

It claws up Billy’s throat, then, hot and angry, the exposed nerve he’s learned to hide in the knowledge that everyone else is just trying to get by, same as him. Ungrateful, he wants to throw in this man’s face. Ungrateful, Steve. Steve who put himself through college with money the government gave him for saving the world while his parents were on vacation because Grant thought becoming a police officer was a waste of his time. Steve, who still ducks his head when anyone compliments him on how good he is at keeping calm in a crisis, at doing the right thing, at following the pieces to the solution, at fucking _math_ because his father used to tell him he was too dumb to amount to anything. 

“The thing is,” Will says from behind Billy’s shoulder, “Steve wasn’t just looking into the lab. We also found some pretty interesting documentation on your company.”

Grant says nothing but looks up at Will’s face for the first time.

“It would be a real shame to leak that information to the press,” Will says. “A real shame, when it looked like he was all set to cover that up for you.”

Grant swallows heavily.

When the news breaks, half an hour later, that Chicago PD detective Steve Harrington and his associate Dustin Henderson, a promising young student, have gone missing in connection to a case Harrington was researching to do with a government sponsored research project reminiscent of MK Ultra, it’s Grant Harrington’s face plastered on the screen opposite Claudia Henderson’s. 

-

**10 AM Chicago, July 9th 1994**

Steve’s not entirely sure how long it’s been since they were taken.

He remembers stopping at a convenience store on the way to his precinct so that Dustin could get Will “apology Reese’s Pieces”. He remembers the car – Billy’s car, his precious Camaro, that had been all-but destroyed nine years ago and then brought back from the dead as a collective Christmas gift from the kids, Hopper and Joyce – being missing when they got out of the store.

He remembers being all kinds of stupid and peering into a dark alley because he thought he saw her taillights.

Then, he remembers a lot of spinning lights, a lot of ambient sound, and, weirdly, watching a really large and really hairy caterpillar for a long time.

The next thing he remembers is Dustin nudging him out of his state of confusion. He doesn’t think he’s slept at all – definitely doesn’t feel like it – but he probably lost some time. 

They’re tied up next to each other on metal chairs, standing on a concrete floor, hands cuffed and ankles bound. There’s a naked lightbulb dangling from the ceiling over a metal table drilled to the floor, a bucket in the corner and other than that, there’s nothing to look at but exposed brickwork.

“Steve,” Dustin hisses urgently. “Steve, can you hear me?”

“Huh?” Steve says.

“Steve!”

“Yeah,” Steve says.

“ _Finally,_ ” Dustin says. He’s shooting for annoyed, but he lands at shaky relief.

“How long have I been out?”

“I don’t know,” Dustin says. “A really long time. You were talking about weird shit.”

“Bad weird shit?” Steve asks, trying to swallow around the intense case of cottonmouth he’s developed and also figure out if he’s divulged state secrets because he was high.

Dustin shakes his head. “Just a lot of stuff about caterpillars.”

“Right,” Steve says. “Good, I think. Were you drugged, too?”

Dustin nods. “It was weird,” he says. “I woke up, like, _hours ago_ and I could smell sounds.”

A man with a big gun comes in then. Steve waves at him with his handcuffed hands. 

Jesus Christ, has he ever been this high?

He remembers staring at the bright lights of the Starcourt ceiling.

Probably he has.

They give him water. It must not be the first time, because he has cottonmouth, not the kind of dizzy, gasping dehydration he would if he’d been trapped here for – hours? Days? He’s not sure. 

He doesn’t want to know how he’s been using the bathroom. He suspects the bucket.

Dustin gets hauled out the room and a man in a lab coat comes in and asks Steve a series of very specific questions about the Upside Down. Steve answers in monosyllables – “don’t know” or, if the answer is a matter of public record, “yes” or “no”. As far as hostage situations he’s been in go, it’s not all bad – no one’s tried to break his face and the drugs didn’t make him say anything really stupid, as far as he knows. 

Dustin comes back unharmed but scowling after some indeterminate period of time in which Steve tried and failed to figure out the angle Mr. Lab Coat was working. 

“Did you tell them anything?” He asks Dustin once they’re gone. It’s not that he doesn’t trust Dustin, it’s that if there’s anyone in their group who might be described as talking too much, it’s Dustin.

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Dustin says. “Also, they’re probably taping us.”

“Right,” Steve says. “Sorry.”

“And like I _told_ them,” Dustin says, louder for the microphones, “I was never _in_ the Upside Down, so I can’t answer their questions anyway.”

Steve elbows him. Then he winces. Even that much activity made him dizzy.

“What, it’s true,” Dustin mutters. “Hey assholes,” he yells again. “People are looking for us out there!”

“Oh my god, Dustin,” Steve says urgently. “Shut up.”

“I thought you would be a lot cooler than this,” Dustin pouts at him. “Don’t you have some secret trick to get out of your handcuffs or something?”

Steve rolls his eyes. “I work on white collar crime, Dustin. Tax fraud and insider trading. That kind of stuff. I don’t have any tricks to get out of handcuffs.” Since he hasn’t seen a video camera anywhere in the room, he risks shaking his head at Dustin as he speaks to show he’s lying. He does know how to get out of handcuffs, he just hasn’t been interested in dislocating his thumb so far. Actually, he’s not entirely sure he _could_ , right now. His head is starting to pound and he’s not exactly feeling up to breaking bones.

“You’re useless,” Dustin tells him, giving him a thumbs-up with his tied together hands. “I only know how to get out of the kind with a quick release.”

“I did _not_ need to know that.”

Dustin makes an exaggeratedly quizzical expression, as if to ask why Steve hasn’t gotten the fuck out yet if he can, so Steve tries to mime looking for clues. He’s not very good at miming a magnifying glass with his hands tied up, so he tries to mime his second reason, which is the guy with the big gun on the other side of the door who brought them water.

That one, Dustin seems to get, so he subsides.

“I’m so cold,” he says eventually.

“Why’d you have to follow me?” Steve wonders.

“What do you mean?”

“Why’d you follow me? I told you to stay in the store.”

“I was worried,” Dustin says. “You were gone a really long time.”

“You should have called someone.”

“Yeah, well, you shouldn’t have gone off on your own.”

“What were we even doing at that store?” He knows this would probably have happened somewhere, store or no, but talking is helping him stay wake.

“Will and I got in a fight,” Dustin says miserably.

Part of Steve really wants to save his energy for finding a way out of here, but on the other hand, it’s Dustin. “What did you fight about?” 

“Your stupid research into the weird lab doing brain chemistry experiments,” Dustin says. “I didn’t tell Will about it.”

Steve winces in sympathy. “Yeah, Billy wasn’t, like, _thrilled_ ,” he starts, and then stops suddenly.

“Dustin,” he says, after a moment’s thought. “What if that lab—”

“Is this lab?” Dustin asks. “Uh, yeah. Who else would want to kidnap us?”

“Huh?”

“If they wanted to know shit about the Upside Down, they’d have El. Or Will. Or maybe Joyce and Hopper. If they wanted to know about the freaky rats or the Mind Flayer, they’d have Will and Billy. If they wanted—”

“Okay, okay, I get it,” Steve says. “But what does a _brain chemistry_ lab have to do with the Upside Down?”

Moments later, Agent Hughes enters the room.

He’s just as unassuming as he was, days ago, telling them the world was about to end, but he’s run-down now, suit rumpled, bags under his eyes.

“Gentlemen,” he says. “I’ve come to propose a truce. Shortly, you will be returned to your families. I’m afraid this has all been a rather large misunderstanding. Now, if you’re prepared to testify as much in court, we can lay all this unpleasantness aside and concentrate on what really matters.”

“And what’s that?” Steve asks. 

“Over the course of our work here, my colleagues and I have become aware of a series of abductions in the area. Young women. We’re prepared to offer what we have by way of hints as to their whereabouts in exchange for a discontinuation of your investigation into our business.” He supports this claim by placing a grainy photo of a young woman, blindfolded and tied up, on a bed with garishly pink sheets in front of them.

“It sounds to me,” Steve says, “Like you’re running out of options and you’re trying to buy our silence to save your own ass.”

“Steve,” Dustin says hoarsely. 

“In fact, if this has all been a misunderstanding, you should have no problem just letting us go with no further assurances.”

“Steve.”

“And given that you have yet to explain why you took us here, what you drugged us with and where we even are, I’m thinking it’s you who took that girl—"

“ _Steve_.”

“ _What_ , Dustin?”

“I know that place.” Dustin points his finger at the photo, handcuffs jangling. “That’s the Gothenburg Inn. US 80, Gothenburg, Nebraska. There’s a doll on the top of all the closets. Must be a video camera in her head.”

“That’s completely—" Agent Hughes begins.

“Are you sure?” 

“Oh, I’m sure,” Dustin says. “I’ve been there fourteen times. I would know that plaid pattern anywhere.”

“That’s a sure way to hide a missing girl’s trail,” Steve says. “Take her a couple states away. Drugged, I’m guessing. What did you do, hide the bodies in Nebraska?”

Agent Hughes loosens his tie. “There were no bodies,” he says.

“I’m sure that makes your mom very proud,” Dustin snaps. “You let them go? Drugged and confused, alone in the middle of nowhere?”

“I—” Agent Hughes begins, but he’s stopped dead by Liz in full tactical gear, shooting the door open.

“Mr. Hughes, you’re under arrest for kidnapping on seventeen charges as well as impersonating a federal officer,” she says. “Hi Steve. You alright?”

“Glad to see you,” Steve says. “Don’t let me stop you.” He knew that guy didn’t seem like a professional. 

She reads Hughes his rights while some other officers Steve doesn’t recognize untie him and Dustin. Dustin gets taken out immediately, but Liz keeps Steve back a moment.

“They let me come along with a SWAT team because it was our case,” she tells him in an undertone when they’re on their way out. “Not that I knew about it before yesterday, partner. Still, any chance to try out one of those bulletproof vests.”

“Thank you,” Steve says. “And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about it. It seemed – risky.”

“It was,” Liz tells him. “You’re lucky you have friends in high places or I would have got myself kidnapped, too, trying to save your ass. Now, you need to get to a hospital and we need to clear out the rest of this basement, and probably all the other basements in the street. We still have seventeen unsolved missing person’s cases, let’s see how many we can solve tonight.”

“If they’re not here, try Gothenburg, Nebraska,” Steve says.

“What the fuck, Harrington,” she says.

Steve considers trying to put what Dustin said before into his own words, and then decides he’s too tired. “I don’t know.”

She shakes her head at him. “Let’s get you out of here. You’ve got a bit less than six feet of a Norse God waiting on you, and I get the feeling he’s not really that patient.”

Steve’s confusion must read on his face.

“Billy?” She asks. “You know, your, uh, roommate? The guy who committed a minor felony to save your ass?”

Relief sizzles through Steve’s joints at the mention of Billy, or maybe that’s just the after-effects of whatever they drugged him with. He’s out of it enough to not even protest when he’s pushed and prodded into an ambulance alongside Dustin and laid down on a stretcher. 

“He’s worse,” he vaguely hears Dustin say. “I think they drugged him more.”

He falls asleep on the way to the hospital, and when he wakes up, he feels like he might still be high, because Billy’s _right there_ at the side of his bed, but on the other side, his father’s reading a newspaper like it’s Saturday morning in Hawkins, before Steve was old enough to be left by himself.

Billy’s by his side in an instant, fingers clumsy on the tubes of the IV Steve has apparently been hooked up to. He leans in close, rests his forehead against Steve’s. “Hi,” he says.

Steve turns his head a fraction to catch Billy’s lips in his when Billy breath hitches in a dry sob. 

“I’m fine,” he whispers, “I’m fine, you’re fine.”

“You asshole,” Billy says, not even trying to be quiet. “You don’t get to scare me like that.”

“I know,” Steve says. “I won’t do it again.”

-

**1 PM, Chicago, July 9th 1994**

“I brought you socks,” is the first thing Will says to Dustin.

Dustin’s sitting upright in a hospital bed he keeps claiming not to need, waiting on someone to return his bloodwork to confirm that he was drugged a lot less than Steve and he can probably go home.

“Thank god,” Dustin says. “I was _so cold_.”

Will’s still hovering anxiously in the doorway, holding his socks.

Dustin reaches into the pocket of his jacket. “I got you these,” he says, holding out a battered package of Reese’s Pieces. “To apologize.”

The next instant, he’s almost bowled over by Will hugging him close.

“You’re never going anywhere alone ever again,” Will says, his voice muffled by his head being buried in Dustin’s shoulder.

“Okay,” Dustin says, hand running through Will’s hair, feet dangling off the side of his hospital bed. “What if I need to pee?”

“I’ll think about it,” Will tells him. “Maybe leave the door open.”

“God, you guys are gross,” Max says, having pushed through the flurry of nurses and doctors running back and forth to accommodate the three women and two toddlers just pulled out of the secret basement lab to hug the side of Dustin not completely engulfed by his boyfriend. “Never go missing again,” she tells Dustin seriously. “Will turns into this sad puppet version of himself.”

“Aw, did you go all Zombie Boy for me?” Dustin asks almost sweetly. “I was never in any danger, Steve was there to protect me.”

“Shut up,” Will says. “Let me be worried when you vanish for forty-eight hours.”

Dustin smiles at him. “I love you,” he says.

“I love you, too,” Will says, hugging him all over again. “And I’m really sorry I yelled at you.”

“I’m sorry I kept secrets,” Dustin says. “I won’t do it again.”

“I’m sorry, too,” Lucas says from his position behind Max. “I’m not really sure for what, but I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, me too,” Will says.

“What did I miss?” Dustin hisses to Max.

“They had a screaming match about how Lucas should be less weird about you guys boning,” Max says, even as both Lucas and Will interrupt to say that it wasn’t a screaming match and it wasn’t about that.

She shrugs at Dustin as if to say, _I rest my case_.

Joyce mercifully interrupts the ensuing discussion, coming up to the doorway and then waving excitedly to someone behind her.

“ _Boys_ ,” she says. “Oh I’m so glad you’re alright.” She succeeds in dragging Dustin out of Will’s arms and hugs him so hard his feet nearly leave the ground. “Your mom’s right around the corner, Dustin, she’s been worried sick.”

Dustin lets himself be hugged within an inch of his life, mouthing “mushrooms!” at Will excitedly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chekov's creepy motel returns
> 
> The epilogue will probably go up on Monday
> 
> Chapter title is from Declan McKenna's "Brazil"
> 
> I hope you've enjoyed this so far! Many thanks to everyone who's left comments and kudos, it means a lot to me that you guys are willing to go so far down the rabbit hole of my little AU here <3


	13. epilogue: to end up with you (all's well that ends well)

**Chicago, July 14th 1994**

The image on the TV zooms in closely on the doll’s dusty, placid face as the newscaster explains that the Gothenburg Inn was home to the gruesome, exploitative stepchild of the MK Ultra experiments. While most subjects were held in the main laboratory in Chicago – here the camera pans to the empty storefront that has been plastered across the news for the last week – in a horrifying twist, pregnant subjects were taken to Nebraska, where they were drugged with LSD and other chemical compounds until the birth of their children, many of whom were stillborn as a result. They had hoped to create humans with extra-sensory perception, the reporter says seriously. The government has denied all involvement, saying the team of scientists, who had already been discredited in Hawkins ten years ago, were acting without the knowledge or approval of government institutions.

A retrospective on the Hawkins National Lab incident begins, and Billy turns the volume on the TV down.

“I knew I recognized that plaid pattern,” Will says, bringing a bowl full of snacks out of the kitchen, Steve hot on his heels with a can of coke for himself and a beer for Billy.

“So, anyway, like I was saying, I was right,” Dustin says to Lucas, “The dolls had eyes, _and_ it was kind of a sex trafficking ring.”

Will narrows his eyes. “I’m not sure that video cameras in the doll’s heads counts as the dolls having eyes.”

“Well, he didn’t eat his own twin in the womb.”

“You don’t know that for sure,” Will argues. “One creepy crime does not make the other stuff impossible. Except maybe the time portal.”

“Man, I still cannot believe you stayed at that motel so many times,” Lucas says. “You could have been kidnapped or murdered or something.”

Dustin blinks at him. “I _was_ kidnapped.”

“Yeah, but I mean—”

They’re still debating the point when Jonathan and Nancy ring the doorbell.

Nancy’s holding a loaf of bread in one hand and a salt shaker in the other. “Happy housewarming,” she says, and gives Will a hug with her hands still full.

“Stop hogging the doorway,” Mike says from behind her, impatient as always.

They spill into the room together, Nancy and Jonathan and Mike and El and Joyce and Hopper. Hopper pats Dustin on the back heavily, saying, “Can’t believe you kids got yourselves in trouble _again_.”

“It wasn’t our fault,” Lucas argues.

“It was a little bit our fault,” Dustin says. “Well. Mine and Steve’s.”

“Yeah, screw you for trying to stop illegal human experiments,” Will tells him, flicking at his nose.

Dustin catches his hand and pulls him close to drop a kiss on his cheek.

Mike makes a face, but Lucas elbows him in the side before he can say anything. He settles for grumbling, “I can’t believe you didn’t call us first.”

“We didn’t want El to get caught up in it,” Billy tells him.

She smiles at him in thanks, and he busies himself with his beer to not look too touched.

Robin is the last to arrive with her girlfriend in tow, looking harried. “Did I miss it?” She asks, settling down on the couch next to Steve.

“Nah,” he says. “It’s starting now.” He turns the volume up just as the news turns to Grant Harrington’s first appearance in court concerning the millions of dollars worth of tax evasion he’s been accused of. The byline at the bottom reads, _arrested by his own son, Chicago PD Detective Steve Harrington_. 

“Aw, come on,” Steve says. “That’s not even true, I didn’t arrest him.”

Will winces a little and tries to leave the room, but Billy calls him back. “Not so fast, Byers,” he says. “You’re the one who blackmailed him.”

“I didn’t know what he did,” Will says. “There were literally just columns of numbers in that document, I don’t know how you do that stuff for a living.”

“I learned how to read the numbers,” Steve says, shooting him a look. “So that I would know what they meant. You know, so seeing random numbers didn’t make me think blackmailing was the way to go.”

“I took a guess? I’m really sorry.”

“Come on,” Jonathan says. “We wouldn’t have gotten you guys out so fast if Mr. Harrington hadn’t gone on TV.”

“And I wouldn’t have had to explain to him that I wasn’t covering for him, and that he was going to have to stand trial no matter what, afterwards,” Steve says. Sure, being drugged up to the gills with enough chloroform and LSD that he’s still on mandatory leave from work a week later and being tied up in a basement was pretty bad, but having to explain to his father right afterwards that he hadn’t been blackmailed by Steve’s police partner, he’d been blackmailed by Steve’s life partner and their college student friend had almost been worse. He’d had to admit he had absolutely no intention of stopping his colleagues from going ahead with their investigation into his dad’s business, couldn’t if he wanted to, and that they had really only given him the documentation on the case as a courtesy.

Because he was still really high when that conversation happened, he went on to say that he’d only gotten into white collar crime in the first place because he had a deep and abiding desire to see men like his father face consequences for their actions and learn to treat other humans with respect.

Steve hasn’t talked to his dad since.

His mom called to invite him out for drinks.

They watch through the end of the segment in silence. 

“Great party, huh,” Dustin says eventually, turning the TV off.

“Happy getting drugged and kidnapped and rescued to you, too,” Steve says, clinking their coke cans together. “Oh hey, Robin, it’s our anniversary of that, too!”

Robin joins the toast.

Her girlfriend, who’s been filled in on everything not specifically listed in Robin’s NDA, which turned out to be a lot, looks between them. “Your whole town should be evacuated,” she says.

“She’s not wrong,” Billy agrees. “Hawkins is the worst.”

“So,” Max says brightly. “What are acid trips like, anyway? I always wondered.”

Nancy looks set to tell her off, mouth pursed, but Dustin’s already expanding on his experience of synesthesia and how, maybe, if your feet aren’t really cold the whole time, it could be fun.

Steve doesn’t mention the caterpillars.

He lets himself slump a little against Billy. It’s nice, to get a few extra days off, even if he’s spent them mostly sleeping off the massive dose of LSD and the two days of no sleep. It’s nicer that Will and Dustin have their apartment set up enough to invite everyone over. It’s nicest that everyone is here, together.

Billy, who’s been extra gentle with him the last few days, wraps an arm around Steve’s shoulders. 

“What’s it like, being the first out, gay officer in your precinct?” Nancy asks him under cover of Lucas and Mike asking a series of really immature questions about acid trips based mostly on hearsay. Steve’s glad none of them experimented with it at college, at least.

Steve groans. “I’m not even gay, I’m bi,” he says. “And you don’t get to write a story about that.”

There had been a lot of reporters around when he was in the hospital. He hadn’t even realized they were interested in him, too, and not the actual victims, that he was being called a hero by every paper in town, until a picture of Billy’s hand at the small of his back as they left the hospital together had made page three of a really shitty gossip rag. 

“I could do damage control,” Nancy says. “Something really tasteful, about all the prejudice you’ve had to deal with and stuff.”

In all honesty, Steve’s colleagues have been really nice about it. Liz had shown up at their apartment yesterday with a basket of muffins and a card from the office. She’d taken pains to say that everyone was looking forward to him coming back, with an unsubtle glance towards Billy. 

“You can say it,” Steve had told her, amused and exasperated.

“Okay,” she had said. “Fine. No one cares that you’re gay. At least, not out loud and not where I can see it.” The last she’d said so fiercely that Steve had felt guilty all over again for not telling her sooner, about Billy, about the case, about everything.

It had seemed like a lot of effort, at that point, to explain that he wasn’t actually gay. He would take what he could get.

“We’ll think about it,” Steve tells Nancy.

“We could take real pictures,” Jonathan offers. “Good pictures of the two of you.” He’d been mostly affronted by the shitty image quality of the pictures of them making the rounds.

Billy sighs deeply next to Steve. “We said we’ll think about it,” he says.

“We’re only in town till next week,” Nancy tells them. “Think fast.”

Steve knows they’re going to do it already. 

He’s still going to make her wait until tomorrow at least.

It’s only fair.

She didn’t invite him to her wedding.

“Hey, honey,” Will’s saying, getting up from his seat, cross-legged on the floor because the couch only seats six and the kitchen chairs only add four more, “You wanna stop talking about acid trips like you actually meant to have one and help me get the rest of the food?”

“If I have to,” Dustin says, but his tone is pleased and amused. He holds out his hands and lets Will pull him upright, overbalancing on purpose to press a kiss to Will’s lips before they head to the kitchen.

“Ugh,” Mike says.

“Hey, dude, stop that,” Lucas hisses in an undertone.

“What?”

“It makes them feel like we’re not okay with them being together.”

“I don’t care about that,” Mike says mulishly. “They’re just too gross and cheesy.”

El and Max both punch him in the side for that.

“Yeah, well,” Lucas says. “So are you.”

“Hey, I am—”

“Come on, it’s a really big deal for Will.” Lucas says it with finality.

“How do you even know?”

“Will yelled at him in front of all of us,” Nancy says with relish. “It was great. You should have been there, it would have done you good.”

Jonathan and Billy trade looks. If Steve were a betting man, he would bet they’re thinking they would have gladly traded places with Mike.

Mike, not thrilled about being the center of attention and even less thrilled about being teased by his sister, reaches out to poke her in the belly. She gasps in mock affront and they’re off, poking and tickling and jarring all the drinks on the coffee table.

“Is everything okay?” Will asks, carrying in a tray full of chips and dip.

“Yeah,” Steve says, watching as the fight dissolves into laughter in front of him. “Everything’s good.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title: Lover by Taylor Swift
> 
> Thanks to everyone who's been following this fic, I hope you enjoyed the end! Let me know what you thought!
> 
> Here's hoping I've either exorcised Will/Dustin from my brain or at least convinced some other people to write it so I can get the content I am thirsting for...
> 
> Also I have never taken LSD so that's why I have no idea what I'm talking about here...

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to the fic that has consumed my waking hours for the last couple weeks. Updates Tues/Thurs.
> 
> This loosely follows [this series](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1571581), but you don't have to have read that to follow this at all. There's [a timeline](https://bewires.tumblr.com/post/190383828850/timeline-for-some-dumb-fanfiction) here on my tumblr, but again, not necessary.
> 
> Fic title is from "This is the Last Time" by the National. Fave lyrics: _I wish everybody knew/What's so great about you._
> 
> Because I am That Person, I will be telling you my fave lyrics from all the songs I misuse for chapter titles. For this chapter, it's the eminently quotable "It's Not Living (If It's Not With You)" by the 1985. Fave lyrics: the switch from _All I do is sit and think about you_ to _All I do is sit and drink without you_
> 
> Please let me know what you think!


End file.
